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Turtle shook her head. “Bean trees,” she said, as plainly as if she had been thinking about it all day. We looked where she was pointing. Some of the wisteria flowers had gone to seed, and all these wonderful long green pods hung down from the branches. They looked as much like beans as anything you’d ever care to eat. “Will you look at that,” I said. It was another miracle. The flower trees were turning into bean trees.

These lines, which come from Chapter Ten, occur as Lou Ann, Taylor, Turtle, and Dwayne Ray sit in Roosevelt Park (commonly known as “Dog Doo Park”). The quotation points to the novel’s idea that miracles happen in modest or unlikely places. Appropriately, it is Turtle who makes the discovery that gives the novel its title. Turtle is herself a miracle in an unlikely place. Like the bean trees discovered in the ugly park, Turtle is discovered in a barren parking lot. And like the dirty, barren park, which later seems magical, Turtle at first strikes Taylor as an unwanted burden, but gradually becomes more and more important to Taylor, until the possibility of losing Turtle becomes the main conflict in the novel.

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