Religious devotion many times leads to fanaticism which kills the family unit. This happens everyday--here is a chronicle of this. This diluted (& superscary-in-a-different-way) version of "The Shining" is complex, emotional. It is written similarly to "The Joy Luck Club", in different vignettes all of which are articulated in a distinguished, feminine P.O.V.

The location is the Congo before and after independence--the plot is about a preacher who treks to the jungle with his family. We end up caring so much for the four doomed Price sisters because their personalities are so different; this affords the reader a chance to breeze through the resounding narrative and never arrive at boredom. Rachel is superficial... a "Paris Hilton" (ha) figure... a Princess with no kingdom and, alas, no King. Leah is the tomboy whose roots remain in Africa even after the "Exodus." Adah is the idiot savant whose keen observations place her in the position of poet. And little Ruth May is the anchor-- the treasure. The mother is a victim of an over-religious spouse who is ineffective both in the community and household. He is in the background, just like all the historical pinpoints of paramount significance (chief of which is Lumumba's assassination, the rise of the dictatorship and the segue to the countless genocides...), & the women (including the thoughts of an older mother Price on her deathbed) are where they belong, in the forefront. They are the heart and brains... & everything is displayed and named as though they were trying to assimilate us into their world, just like they had to evolve in harsh Africa. Whereas they had many hardships & moments of deep despair (were alone, except for "The Eyes in the Trees"), we the reader have awesome tour guides in all these accounts of the five unique women.

This is the book Kingsolver was destined to write. It is her life's culmination, her masterpiece. Wrapped up in a fabulous piece of fiction we learn volumes from her expertise in African culture. It is what makes her voice so authentic.

What amazes me about this story, is Barbara Kingsolver's ability to write five very distinct, very different characters and give them all a believable voice. The characters were so vivid, real in their flawed insecurities, and so utterly different. I found myself constantly annoyed with Rachel's shallow stupidity and yet invested in her story. With almost smug satisfaction, I watched her board the plane that would forever change her life. I wish every self-centered girl could experience life in a third-world country and gain some perspective. While I found myself sympathetic to Orleanna's ordeal I didn't find myself congruent to her decisions or Kingsolver's prejudice in her feminist message. Ruth May's chapters are sweet and while I enjoyed her character without much depth or growth to her she is the character I remember the least, perhaps because I found her voice least authentic and Kingsolver tried to emulate the innocent non-understanding voice of a child in her thought-provoking intelligent tone.

What I loved most was the complete balance between the twins. The naive optimistic Leah who blindly idolizes her father is the polar opposite of Adah's bitter resentment who finds no hope or reason for faith in life. If it weren't for Kingsolver's obvious disdain for Leah's paternal allegiance, I would have related most to her character. I felt sorry for Adah's self pity, found a kindred spirit in her literary mind, and loved her palindromes. Between the negative and positive I felt I got a more balanced view of their Africa experience. As they evolve into their mature characters, they almost swapped places. Leah is the one who became bitter and rebellious while Adah assured and accepting. Adah was the character I most enjoyed, especially the more the book progressed and she learned to release her clawing grip on being the crooked girl obsessed with symmetry.

What was counterproductive in my opinion was her portrayal of the controlling, unyielding preacher and her refusal to give him a voice. Had she made Nathan a kind well-meaning preacher misguided in his mission to save Africa, I would have taken her questions about Christian values imposing their views on the rest of the world better. But instead of finding myself taking her stance that other cultures and religions have value and should be unaltered by Christian oppression, I found myself wanting to side with the minister and defend his decision to uproot his family, take them halfway around the world, and sacrifice their own comforts for the charitable saving of a nation. And I eventually sympathized with his sad grasp at resolution, absolution.

While I know there are stringent unyielding religious men, I found his character heavily stereotyped and reveals her own prejudice. Even the viewpoint of the believing children in the beginning seemed to mock a dependence on God to understand the world. Brother Price (and Leah) depict classic Christian pitfall: to expect the Lord to save and shelter you if you are good. If you are not protected either there is no God or you need more penitence. I wish Kingsolver had left one of her characters to embrace the comfort of religion in their sorrows. I felt that Kingsolver's ultimate message is that one must give up the fanciful religious optimism of one's youth to become a well-rounded intelligent individual, that optimism is best served to nurture physical rather than spiritual needs.

She inserted brother Fowles to showcase how she thought the missionary efforts should go: keep their culture and introduce some Christian principles to enhance their lives, but I disagree. He seemed more of a service missionary without introducing much gospel into his efforts. And what preaching he did do he let meld with their superstitious belief. But I didn't feel that a perversion of truth was the right answer either. Is service without gospel always the answer? Is the only Christian value worthy of dishing out love thy neighbor and leave them to their own believes when you truly feel you can save them? If these tribe members had embraced Christianity and given up their traditions would that really have been a bad thing?

Just as Nathan's stubborn unyielding stance brought him no believers in Africa where an appreciation for their culture could have bridged the gap, Kingsolver's position does the same with readers. If you are already inclined to despise missionary efforts you'll probably agree with her analysis that Christians should mind their own business and leave culture worldwide to thrive. But I doubt her depiction of Christianity as unyielding is winning any Christians to reconsider their tolerance level. And I believe meddling in a nation politically falls on a completely different level than spiritually. We never hear American rationale for intervening in the Congo, only Leah's projection of African sentiment, which is the voice of Kingsolver who obviously feels that foreign countries should have left the Congo to their own accord, that the damage left was worse than if the tribes were left on their own. When one grows up abroad it's easy to become weary of your country's intervention than to feel it's rescuing powers.

Kingsolver's love and understanding for the Africa shines through and is the strongest asset in the novel. Perhaps that is why she feels so saddened by Western efforts to change it and eager to show a resilient country so big and so different that it is resistant to outside influence. I felt transported into the tribes of Africa as I vividly saw this politically unstable era take shape as the backdrop to this family's story and especially loved Anitole's take on African life. Years after reading this I can still visualize the ants overtaking the village. I can see the heavy rains (symbolizing the differences of Africa) demolishing Nathan's garden (the symbol of his inability to conform to another culture) and still think about the tarantulas crawling in bananas or wild cats following children home. Most of all, I enjoyed the accurate glimpse into the cultural values of this opposing social structure from the perspective of understanding instead of judgment.

But once again, instead of making me want to visit the continent and save its inhabitants, it verified my fears and conviction to steer clear. I feel that Kingsolver wanted to inspire humanitarian activists in her readers, but I find myself overwhelmed. This well-meaning family made no difference and were only swallowed in the culture and their problems themselves. What could I do? I feel useless and inadequate to affect any change and therefore my only reaction is "I don't want to go to Africa." Somewhere between Rachel's haughty superiority and Leah's efforts to single-handedly save the world, I lie in my exasperation as I wash my hands of mess to big for me.

Maybe Kingsolver wanted us to feel hopeless and show that there is no small, quick solution for Africa coming from Western value. Or maybe her only motive was to open our eyes to the quality of life in other countries so we don't take our own for granted. Having lived in third-world countries, I know firsthand what she is describing. And maybe my own experience is what overwhelms me. Change cannot come from the outside. And on that level I can understand her frustration with the Nathan Prices in the world who stubbornly see Africa from Western eyes. If the bitter truth about Africa didn't inspire action on my part, at least it gave me a history lesson about a country and time I know little about and for that I highly enjoyed the book. Who doesn't love a real history lesson mashed up in an interesting story?

In the end maybe I'm not supposed to learn anything from the book, but enjoy the story of a family swallowed up by Africa so different from there mild Southern upbringing that they are left cultural shocked wanderers never taking root in either extreme that cannot understand the other half of themselves. I loved watching each of the characters mature, develop, and change as they came to understand African culture and how truly blessed they had been stepping off the plane with cake mixes and tools stuck inside their layers of clothes. I wanted to hear their stories and was vested in their outcome. The story is very well written and an excellent choice for book club discussions as you explore which characters you related to and what messages you take from the book. A powerful read that won't soon leave your memory.

One of my favorites, and also the very first example I ever saw of alternating first person POVs. There is so much depth and wordplay here, and such *naked* pain. My heart aches every time I think about this book!

"Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their own precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines stragling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.
Away down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. Seen from above, they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve."

Alternately profound, beautiful, and terrifying, The Poisonwood Bible is the story of a Baptist missionary who brings his wife and four daughters to a village in the Congo in the 1950s so he can convert the heathens. If you're backing away in apprehension now, don't worry. The story is told through the changing viewpoints of the wife and the four daughters, none of whom really want to be there. It's an incredible and eye-opening read, and I especially appreciated how Kingsolver seemed to cover all the lessons and subjects Chinua Achebe tried to in Things Fall Apart, only she does it so, so much better. Yes, I know Achebe's book is supposed to be the more valid read because he's a native of the country he's writing about and not a white imperialist etc etc, but I don't care. When it comes down to eloquence and storytelling ability, Kingsolver wins by a landslide. Everyone should read this book. They should read Things Fall Apart only if they really feel like it.

Chinua Achebe can suck it. He got beat at his own post-colonial game by a white imperialist American lady writer. BURN.

I began reading this book with hesitancy and a good portion of discernment. It had been recommended by a non-Christian co-worker as a good book for me to read since "you want to become a missionary." I'm really glad I read it though. There are a number of things I really appreciated about the book.

I really liked how the author, Barbara Kingsolver, told the story through the eyes of each of the characters. She was able to pull off a consistent and believable use of a different storytelling voice for each individual. This is something that, if done poorly, could result in a book that is a total nuisance to read. But when done well, as in this case, it sweeps the reader along into the hearts and minds of the characters.

I felt like Kingsolver captivatingly addressed the concept of mission effort gone awry. I'm glad I had the chance to read Kingsolver's work, because I think it captures the misgivings that many of my non-Christian friends have when they think of "Christian missions." As an example of this, my husband Mike can recount the conversation he had with a co-worker where the guy he was working with got kind of offended at hearing Mike's interest in missions: "What gives you the impression that you can just go over and tell the Japanese people to believe in your God?"

Kingsolver captures some of the concerns & misunderstandings of modern missions that our friends may feel as they hear our interest in missions.

Kingsolver's descriptions also ring true with some of the crazy foibles that have been recounted in true missions history. When I took a missions course called Perspectives  the unit on "The History of Missions" was particularly eye-opening. Kingsolver is not just pulling these ideas out of thin air. There have definitely been some crazy abuses of people and culture -- some gross insensitivities displayed by some missionaries of the past.

One more thing I enjoyed about this book was the sometimes humorous, sometimes sobering pictures and impressions that it left in my mind. Archetypes of sorts, that I will carry with me in the future. Whenever I pack to go overseas, I will probably always think about piling on 15 layers of clothing, stuffing small kitchen appliances in my bosom, and boxes of cake mix in my coat pockets as I board the airplane.

-Jen

5 epic, no wonder this book is so well-loved stars, to The Poisonwood Bible! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Review of the audio.

Masterpiece. It took me nearly a month to finish it.
It ends here.

The ratings and reviews for this book are mixed, and I can understand that because I am balancing some love/hate feelings myself. But it's compelling in it's unique way, and it's certainly tragic.

The story is about a fanatical Baptist preacher from Georgia who takes his wife and 4 daughters on a Christian mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. If that's
not the perfect recipe for disaster then I haven't seen one.

The history of this part of Africa, especially the political history, is so convoluted that it defies understanding. And the methods used by some of these Christian missions is also quite baffling. That's certainly the case here.

The book is written from 5 points of view, the mother and the 4 daughters. They are the ones most adversely affected by the move, the culture shock, but mostly the influence of an abusive, and severely misguided father. The views and personalities of these characters are so different, it's hard to believe they are part of the same family.

The genius of Kingsolver's writing is her ability to bring all this together into a believable and interesting plot. It's a difficult an disturbing read, with characters that have flaws, and events that leave the reader heartbroken.

4 stars.

The Poisonwood Bible is a fascinating story of Nathan Price, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

The story is related through the wife and four daughters. Through controversial storytelling, they reveal how their mission actually reshaped their beliefs. However, it doesn’t develop the perspective of the father, and I can see how some who take his side might have some issues with this storytelling, especially when it deals with Christianity. The women connect with native people. The father struggles with that. He simply preaches, basing his beliefs strictly on the Bible.

The story is very rich in historical background. The characters are richly developed. It evokes human emotions. However, some may not like its representation, which is driven by one side.

This story has resonated with many. I’m in the minority with my rating. This book has everything I’d look for in a story. However, I found the pace slow. My rating is not based on debatable subject, but the pace. Also, the first half of the book has a better flow than the second half.

UPDATE: Kingsolver finally won her Pulitzer (albeit shared with a lesser work) for the magnificent Demon Copperhead in 2023. Still, for me, this remains her masterpiece!

This was a fantastic read full of poetry and beautiful prose about the crumbling of a Christian missionary family in the Congo in the late 50's/early 60s. The Price family - a rigid, fundamentalist preacher, his wife, and their four daughters - arrive from Bethlehem, GA in a village in Congo and are faced with the emptiness of their beliefs against the fullness of the life of the Congolese around them. The daughters are all quite different: Rachel, the older beauty, who is in denial of the inadequacy of her moral code and social aspirations among the vines, spiders, and mud; Lea and Adah, the twins, both brilliant in their own ways but Lea being skeptical and healthy whereas Adah is physically impaired and willingly mute; and the baby Ruth-May who is the first one to make a social bond with the kids of the village. As the situation in Congo deteriorates (the horrific Belgian colonial government yielding to a democratically elected Patrice Lumumba who is assassinated with help of the CIA and replaced by the corrupt and violent Mobutu), the family disintegrates. They face famine, flood, ant invasions, and social rejection as their lives unravel.

One of the themes of the book is language - Kingsolver, in an appendix after the book, says that she had a small team of linguists to ensure that her use of Kingala dialect was as accurate as possible. The Bible is, naturally, crucial to the story, but the point is made how interpretation and translation are so critical to the meaning of certain passages. Similarly, the words of Nathan Price's sermons are necessarily translated for the villagers by the helpful Achille, and we learn that the word for "the Lord" is the same word for poisonwood, a tree that causes severe skin rashes - this the title of the book and the confusion of the villagers whom to Nathan's dismay, end up voting Jesus out of their village in an election during a church service. It is a really interesting book!

The story is told with gorgeous descriptions in the voices of all five women characters. The reader is carried along with the catastrophic events and the aftermath as each survivor goes on a different path at the end. One of them rests glued to the past, two of them try to guard some degree of optimism for the future, and one accepts her station and shows little evolution of her colonial mindset. I won't spoil anything for you because you really should take the time to enjoy it yourself.

This book lost out in 1999 to The Hours for the Pulitzer Prize. I can't quite remember that book, I'll need to re-read it, but I think that the imagery and prose of The Poisonwood Bible was probably more deserving of the prize that year.

This year I’ve been re-reading some literature I first read while too young to fully appreciate or simply don’t remember well—this one I read as a teen, and liked for its critique of Christian fundamentalism, but remembered almost nothing else about. As it turns out, it was well worth the re-read.

The novel focuses on three teenaged and one kid sister, dragged to a village in what was (in 1959) the Belgian Congo by their tyrannical missionary father. Narrated in turns by the four girls and occasionally their mother, it traces their many missteps in dealing with a culture and way of life they know nothing about, and their coming-of-age, just as the Congo gains its independence only to be undermined by a U.S.-backed coup.

By far the book’s most impressive feature is the voices. All five points-of-view are in the first person, which almost no one pulls off successfully. I’ve said before that no author should attempt multiple narrators before having at least 10 novels under their belt, and this was only Kingsolver’s 4th! Though, per the supplementary material, she spent an entire procrastinatory year writing the same scenes over and over from all five perspectives to fully inhabit and differentiate their voices. (Which makes me wonder how many palindromes she invented but didn’t get to use!) At any rate, the voices are all distinct and believable and bring the characters to life; they’re impressive and simply a pleasure to read. And as a literary author, Kingsolver clearly trusts herself and her audience: moments of great emotional weight are often quite understated, not dwelled upon and sometimes relayed through a peripheral point-of-view. And yet we don’t need everything spelled out; we come to understand these people and what events mean to them, and that restraint adds heft to the story.

There are plenty of other impressive aspects as well. The book’s first 400 pages are compelling and often intense, growing increasingly dark but without losing track of mundane realities. It’s an immersive story that drags the reader into the characters’ experiences. The settings are vivid, and Kingsolver has clearly done her research into the setting and its history. Most first-worlders-in-the-jungle novels take the invent-a-tribe route, but here, while the village is invented the culture is not, and much of the story is informed by translations from Kikongo. It is respectful of the locals and interested in their actual lives, rather than just what they represent vis-à-vis the American family (there is some tendency to romanticize “the simple life,” but this is generally balanced by showing actual social problems and personality conflicts in the village—with one or two exceptions, situations not improved by meddlers from abroad). Kingsolver wrote this book in part because she wanted to bring awareness to U.S. involvement in Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s murder, and it’s a good novel to read if you want to learn more about consequences of meddling with poorly-understood foreign countries. But (at least for the first 400 pages) the book keeps the focus firmly on the protagonists while the history plays out in the background. And the book leaves the reader with a lot to think about regarding its characters and everyone’s responsibility for the state of the world.

That said, the last 140 pages are essentially the world’s longest epilogue. We follow everyone through decades of their separate adult lives, largely in narrative summary and without the momentum of those first 400 pages. There’s something to be said for seeing the aftermath, how the events of the main story reverberate throughout the survivors’ lives, and I was interested enough in the characters to care, but 140 pages is still a lot. This is exacerbated by the fact that nearly half of those 140 pages go to Leah, whose adult life is far more chaotic than her sisters’—you’d think this would be a good thing, but so much incident packed into so little space quickly becomes dry, not helped by Kingsolver’s trying to shove all of Congolese history in there too. Though admittedly, I was also just frustrated with the adult Leah, the way she runs on outrage and what felt like performative virtue, without doing anyone much good. I was far more interested in reading about Adah—who was always my favorite by a mile, and who does do some good, perhaps because she lacks Leah’s obsession with righteousness—and even Rachel, who is fairly awful as a person but at least has an interesting voice. Leah gets stuck with the “default” voice, the one that’s distinctive only by not being distinctive when her sisters’ voices are, which isn’t a problem in the main story with its quick POV shifts but does cause her later, longer sections to drag.

This is not to say the novel is otherwise perfect. The characters didn’t always quite satisfy me, the biggest offender being Rachel. The four sisters fit neatly into four archetypes of fictional girls—girly-girl, tomboy, nerd, and baby—but Leah, Adah and Ruth May all have more going on than just that. Whereas Rachel’s entire personality is girly-girl and selfishness. To Kingsolver’s credit, she’s still well-written—she’s relatable; I suspect a lot of us can see the worst of ourselves in Rachel. But for Rachel herself that worst is all there is: she seems genuinely incapable of love or empathy, and I was left uncertain whether this was intentional. Some secondary characters also seemed a little more extreme than circumstances seemed to warrant, though opinions may reasonably differ.

At any rate, this is a book that will leave the reader with plenty to think and talk about, and one that has held up well thus far. Certainly worth a read for the interested.