Second, she is badly bruised, but cannot talk about it, which is representative of domestic abuse that women suffer but cannot talk about just to keep their family together. Kingsolver wrote, “The Indian girl was a girl. A girl, poor thing. That fact had already burdened her short life with a kind of misery I could not imagine” (Bean 25). The author here shows that being a girl usually signify an uneasy life, something that is explicated throughout the rest of the novel. The tone having been set, the reader cannot but react to this incident. People may not care about the plight of an adult woman, but there is hardly anyone who will not be sympathetic to the physical abuse of a child, irrespective of