My introduction to the fiction of Barbara Kingsolver is The Poisonwood Bible, her 1998 novel that seems to be a staple of book clubs the world over, from Oprah's to the Dive Bar Book Club I've joined and which picked this as their August read. This book was an assignment and took me out of the rhythm I was in reading westerns, so that might have something to do with my crankiness and general disappointment of it in summary. Kingsolver immersed me in extraordinary description, materializing the distant world of central Africa out of a haze. But the book is too long, climaxing on page 385 of 543, and suffers from a problem of focus.

After a dreamy prologue in which a woman in her autumn years named Orleanna Price looks back on her life while on a beach in Georgia, the epic begins in the village of Kilanga, in what was then the nation of Congo. The year is 1959. The narrative is picked up by one of Orleanna's four daughters, Leah, who at the age of 14 begins as perhaps the most devoted to the calling of her father, the Reverend Nathan Price, a minister who campaigned with the Southern Baptist Mission League and raised tithes from his congregation in Bethlehem, Georgia for the opportunity to relocate his family to the village on the Kwilu River and save its souls.

The experience of the Prices in Congo is also related by Leah's fearless five-year-old sister Ruth May, her crooked spined but sharp minded 14-year-old twin Adah and her vapid 16-year-old sister Rachel. Though Kilanga once hosted four American missionary families and a doctor, the consensus by the Baptist couple who greet the Prices in Leopoldville is that it has fallen on hard times without a white person, the last holdout being a Catholic missionary named Fowles who apparently went native. After a raucous reception by the villagers, Father swings into action, planning baptisms in the Kwilu and planting a demonstration garden to teach the natives how to grow food.

Leah recalls, Not everyone can see it, but my father's heart is as large as his hands. And his wisdom is great. He was never one of those backwoods ministers who urge the taking up of copperhead snakes, baby-flinging, or the shrieking of nonsense syllables. My father believes in enlightenment. As a boy he taught himself to read parts of the Bible in Hebrew and before we came to Africa he made us all sit down and study French, for the furtherance of our mission. He has already been so many places, including another jungle overseas, in the Philippine Islands, where he was a wounded hero in the Second World War. So he's seen about everything.

The family share their home with a housekeeper whose pleas to Father to avoid the poisonwood bush in his garden and to plant in hills instead of rows are ignored. Brother Fowles left them furniture and a parrot named Methuselah, whose litany of curses--blamed on the Catholic missionary but actually due to a despairing Orleanna as her efforts to bake Rachel a birthday cake in Africa fail--so enrages the reverend that he banishes the bird to nature. Father's vision of baptizing the village in the Kwilu is mightily rejected. A crocodile killed a child on the same spot and word goes out that the white man wants to feed their children to the crocodiles.

Villagers content with their native gods watch the Prices for signs of how powerful Jesus is. Leah (nicknamed Beene, or truth) is thrilled when Father chooses her to accompany him to Leopoldville to witness the country's Independence from Belgium. Ruth May (Bandu, littlest one on the bottom) breaks through to the village children by teaching them to play Mother May I. Rachel (Mvula, a pale termite only seen after a rain) has her blonde hair yanked by children certain it must be a wig. Adah (Benduka, Crooked Walker) is so given to wandering off that when blood and the track of a lion are found behind hers, the village chief brings news of her demise.

Leah becomes attracted to a young schoolteacher named Anatole, who translates the sermons of "Reverend Prize" to Kikongo. When they lose their housekeeper in a row with Father over his baptism scheme, Anatole recommends one of his students, an able boy named Nelson, help out. Father refuses to heed the calls of their sponsors to leave Congo after the Belgian handover, even when their stipend is cut off. Mother grows despondent and bedridden and it is left up to the girls to feed the family while Father practices his sermons on the lilies. When she finally comes out of her stupor, Orleanna declares she is getting her girls out of here as soon as she finds a way. Rebellion is in the air.

Leah recalls, All my life I've tried to set my shoes squarely into his footprints, believing if only I stayed closed enough to him those same clean, simple laws would rule my life as well. That the Lord would see my goodness and fill me with light. Yet with each passing day I find myself farther away. There's a great holy war going on in my father's mind, in which we're meant to duck and run and obey orders and fight for all the right things, but I can't always make out the orders or even tell which side I am on exactly. I'm not even allowed to carry a gun. I'm a girl. He has no inkling.

While Leah emerges as the central narrative voice, each Price woman is given her own perspective in what gradually becomes a story about the assertion of a woman's independence from the male authority figure dictating her existence. A decent amount of suspense is generated as that battle culminates. Kingsolver, who in preparations for her 543-page novel never set foot in what was known from 1971 to 1997 as Zaire due to travel restrictions of the Mobutu regime, is a language artist first and foremost. Her descriptions of the Congo are vivid--hissing, smoking and at times overwhelming the senses before exploding like a multitude of fireworks.

It was hot that day, in a season so dry our tongues went to sleep tasting dust and woke up numb. Our favorite swimming holes in the creek, which should have been swirling with fast brown water this time of year, were nothing but dry cradles of white stones. Women had to draw drinking water straight from the river, while they clucked their tongues and told stories of women fallen to crocodiles in other dry years, which were never as dry as this one. The manioc fields were flat: dead. Fruit trees barren. Yellow leaves were falling everywhere, littering the ground like a carpet rolled out for the approaching footsteps of the end of time. The great old kapoks and baobabs that shaded our village ached and groaned in their branches. They seemed more like old people than plants.

Moving down the list from "language artist," Kingsolver may be a historian, geographer and storyteller in that order. That should be reversed. There's a lack of focus that grew thicker the more I read. I didn't mind jumping from the head of one Price woman to the other, but the flaw of the novel is that rather lock on a damn good story--a family's revolt against a dictatorial patriarch--it gets lost in trying to tell the impressions of a family's thirty years in Africa. The latter is nowhere near as compelling as the former. The novel climaxes on page 375 and keeps kept throwing description for another 168 pages. It's too much table dressing and not enough meal for me.

3.5 stars

There is something distinct and refreshing about the short, simple, sometimes lyrical sentences in this book. And wow what a story. The angle the story took of a post-colonial African country was also interesting. The remorse and reflection was illuminating, something that nonfiction from similar settings and era really fail to do.

The story takes place in the former Belgian Congo, also formerly the republic of Congo, then Zaire, and now The DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo). The political setting is the reign of the authoritarian, Mobutu, and the events leading up to getting the country from colony to democratic country, while also painting the picture of post-colonial education--or the lack thereof--and how that played an important role in rectifying political turmoil.

The angle of the missionary family was a good addition to a familiar story. The missionary dad in this family resembles the dad in Purple Hibiscus and The Smell of Apples : oppressive, controlling, devoid of reason. The family of six (dad, mom, and four girls) leave their home in America and settle in rural Africa, within a small village that hasn't yet caught up with the modern world, and this dad is somehow tricked into believing that he is the superior power sent to rule the inferior Africans. You can only imagine where the story goes from there. I must say, I saw bits and pieces of Things Fall Apart in this work.

There is some melancholy and beauty, though the book feels as if it could have been a hundred pages shorter. There were five narrators, all who were supposed to have different styles and voices, yet at times they blended together into the voice of an overall arching narrator. At times, Adah, one of my favorite narrators, started to sound like an older woman and not the young girl she was supposed to be. The history of the Congo was muddled in certain places and with five narrators, it was just hard to keep excited. I ended up growing to like Leah and Anatole's characters better because of the purpose their juxtaposed relationship seemed to fill within the bigger narrative.

I came to this book with The Bean Trees still fresh in my mind, confident that I would enjoy it thoroughly. I found it a very different kind of novel, in many respects (e.g., the alternating voices of multiple narrators, the very different locale (the Belgian Congo instead of the American Southwest), and the author's increasingly intrusive political message). While I adapted to the changes and got through to the end, it was not the enjoyable experience I'd hoped for. I understand that for the author it was a more ambitious undertaking and acknowledge that pushing the limits on one's craft is the right thing to do. However, in such cases there's the risk of attempting more than can be successfully done.

Like The Bean Trees, this one celebrates the virtue of personal loyalty. That aspect of it comes through loud and clear. Drawing characters like Anatole, who are more than plausible, is one of Kingsolver's strengths. Another is her ability to get the most out of our language in telling a story. After reading this, I think Kingsolver should stick with what she does best.

In trying to get my arms around what I dislike about this book, I'll just say it began with mounting frustration over the helplessness of the mother and her daughters in the unspeakable situation created by Rev Price (who, we eventually learn, suffered from an untreated mental illness/brain injury).

On top of this was laid a very biased explanation of African history. Both the UN and the French government concur that the Eisenhower administration did NOT have a hand in the assassination of The Congo's first elected leader, as Kingsolver charges. On the contrary, Lumumba was deposed by a political rival, Kasa-Vubu, and he suffered what likely would have been the other guy's fate had the coup not succeeded. I'm sorry it suits Kingsolver's purposes to imply a parallel between her deranged character Rev. Price and the country he came from as the common source of the turmoil described here, because this fictional work is likely the only input many readers will ever have on the subject. Then, at the end of the book, two of the grown daughters are leading peaceful lives across the borders of Angola and the Republic of Congo, two countries with equally atrocious Marxist rule that the author completely ignores. This is no way for anyone to get their history.

Ok, one other gripe, now that I've gotten myself worked up: One of the Price daughters is nonverbal and presumably suffers from CP or something similar (i.e., congenital brain injury). Once she's grown she gets a little advice from a friend and performs some therapy upon herself and -- voila! -- she's cured. And not only cured but in short order a graduate of medical school. As the parent of an adult with a congenital brain injury, I truly hate to see anyone pretend that such things work out that easily.

In short, I liked Barbara Kingsolver a lot more before I picked up this book.

This is, quite simply, one of the best, most powerful, most resonant, most surprising, most beautiful, most alive novels I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Barbara Kingsolver seems to have written this toweringly stunning book after peering into the deepest corners of her soul. She was clearly animated and awakened by the profound outrage and horror she felt as she came to understand what colonialism and American capitalist interventionist policies had done to the Congo, where she had briefly lived as the child of foreign aid workers.

I had read her first novel, The Bean Trees, many years ago, as it was a favorite of my mother’s. I remember finding it to be a sweet but somewhat shallow book. I think that’s partly why I had put off reading The Poisonwood Bible, which I’ve owned for many years; I was worried it would be overhyped. I could not have been more wrong. It has weight and wisdom and gorgeous prose and complex ideas and a thoroughly human and altogether inventive approach, and deserves every inch of praise it has received.

It’s the sort of book that leads me to feel almost silly as I attempt to capture its profound impact in a Goodreads review. I am changed by it: expanded, enlightened, shattered, and deeply, deeply moved.

This book has done nothing to change my opinion that all missionaries belong in large black kettles, boiling slowly over an open flame, while the natives they had hoped to convert stand hungrily by, waiting for a hearty meal.

Though technically a minor character in the book, patriarch Nathan Price looms large over his small tribe of women. With no regard for the well-being of his family, he drags his wife and four daughters to deepest Africa, because, of course, he is on a mission from God. Price embodies everything that I find wrong with religion - close-minded rigidity, the belief that every word of the bible is absolute and must be obeyed, and the uniquely Christian belief that man has been given permission to run roughshod over all of nature. His attitude toward his wife and children is scandalous. States one daughter - he considers himself "captain of a stinking mess of female minds." He abuses them both verbally and physically. In short, he is one of the most loathsome characters I've ever met.

Price turns out to be unpopular with the natives as well. He disregards completely their established beliefs and traditions. His attempts at baptism in a crocodile-filled river are met with understandable distain. Ultimately, it his love of religion over his family that is his undoing.

Much of the book deals with the struggle of the Congo to find independence, a chapter in history of which I was woefully ignorant. The United States plays a shameful role in orchestrating many of the coups. Perhaps this is why we were not taught about it in school.

The book is narrated in turns by the daughters. Each girl picks up the story and moves it along, rather than simply providing yet another viewpoint of previous incidents. The girls all have unique voices. Leah gives a straight-forward, even handed narrative, always trying to see both sides of the story. Her twin, Adah, who suffers from some brain damage, does not speak aloud and is fond of anagrams. Ruth May, the youngest child, adapts most easily to life in Africa. And then there is vain, supercilious Rachel, the oldest girl, who sometimes hilariously misuses words - "It's a woman's provocative to change her mind." Ironically, she is the sister who manages to best sum up the saddest facts of the book - Father thought "he'd save the children and what does he do but lose his own?" and "You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back!"

This is a good story, well told and memorable. It is also a learning experience.

Where to start in discussing this book. Kingsolver presents us with a family of naive Americans, pious Father, somewhat subservient mother, and four daughters, newly arrived in the Congo on their father's mission to convert the natives to God's ways. What follows is a description of the failure of the "mission", the family, the changes that occur in everyone involved. We witness growth and stagnation in these people as they interact with their surroundings and the people they live alongside in primitive conditions.

Over time we will see life and death, love and hate on a grand scale, the birth and strangling of a nation, so much that happens in Africa.

Through the eyes of the Price daughters, and to some extent their mother, we see how Africa and Congo can affect individuals, building their strengths or exaggerating their weaknesses. The daughters have wonderfully independent voices. These are joined by various Congolese citizens, other missionaries and some questionable sorts who figure prominently in the story.

Other than what felt like a slightly quick ending, I loved this book. I felt I came to know Orleanna and her daughters. I care about them and actually would like to know even more about what has happened to them. But their largest story happened in the past.

I suggest reading this if you haven't already. Don't be put off by the length...it reads easily.

I'm struggling between 4 and 5 for rating. I think I will go with the 5 for all the enjoyment and information.

The Poisonwood Bible is about a Southern Baptist family that decides to go be missionaries in the Congo in 1960, just before the country was supposedly granted its independence from Belgium. The Prices didn't bother with language or culture training, they just took off to spread the word about Jesus. Of course they weren't prepared for what they found, so of course they got in a lot of trouble.

I can't exactly put my finger on what I didn't like. I just know that it felt like it dragged on and on and on and on. I sort of expected the book to end when they finally left the village, but I still had another 150 pages to go. It could be that I never really cared much about any of the characters, although I was glad when it was Adah's turn to tell part of the story because I did like her wordplay.

I gathered from the forward that the author spent time in the Congo as a child, so she is telling a story that she has some first-hand knowledge of. And I was left wondering when we in the US are ever going to learn to keep our nose out of other countries' business. We are not painted in a very flattering light in this book.

All I can say is that this was not the book for me. I'm rapidly reaching the conclusion that I should stay away from Oprah's books because I don't think I've really enjoyed any of them. That being said, if you like Oprah's books, you will probably like this one also.

My local book club is discussing this book tomorrow morning --

I read this before I joined Goodreads. This story was 'gripping' -(I still remember my gut was hurting at times) -

This novel left a lasting -- YEARS LASTING impression --

Highly recommend it!!!!!!!!

“The forest eats itself and lives forever.”
Image: “The Trees Have Eyes” by Angela Wright

There is magic in these pages. Not the supernatural kind. Not the magical-realism kind. But magic of language and of the TARDIS kind: by some strange sorcery, many huge themes are thoroughly but lightly explored in single volume that is beautiful, harrowing, exciting, tender, occasionally humorous, and very approachable.

“We messengers of goodwill adrift in a sea of mistaken intentions.”

Freedom and Forgiveness

“I was lodged in the heart of darkness… I cowered beside my cage, and though my soul hankered after the mountain, I found... I had no wings.”

This is multi-layered, multi-faceted, and multi-narrated. But the many themes all concern the craving for freedom. Freedom of individuals and of nations, from exploitation, superstition, poverty, hunger, disease, bad relationships, and colonial oppressors.

When freedom is offered, there is the difficulty of recognising it and having the courage to accept it. In the final third, the stories flow in separate channels, yet the theme narrows to the idea that freedom requires letting go. Specifically, we must forgive others and ourselves before we can be truly free.

Genesis, The Revelation, The Judges, Bel and the Serpent, Exodus, Song of the Three Children, and The Eyes in the Trees

The seven sections are titled after pertinent books of the Bible or Apocrypha.

In 1959, a Baptist minister takes his wife and four daughters (Rachel, twins Leah and Adah, and little Ruth May) from suburban Georgia, USA on a one-year mission to a remote village in the Congo, shortly before independence. The first two-thirds concern their departure, arrival, and year in Kilanga. The remainder follows their diverging lives up to 1986 and beyond. The final section is a slightly superfluous race through a couple of decades.

The narration switches between Orleanna, the now elderly wife/mother looking back, and the four daughters nearer the "now" of that stage of the story. All are independent minded and intelligent, each with a distinctive voice, which develops plausibly with the story (except for the one Kingsolver probably least identifies with, who becomes something of a caricature in middle age). Each illustrates a different Western approach to Africa: meidcal fix, submission/immersion, political reform, colonial paternalism. They could easily just be stereotypes (vicar's wife; the sweet sixteen, caring about cosmetics and fashion; the nature-loving, religious tomboy; the silent, thoughtful, limping observer; the gregarious child), but Kingsolver makes each uniquely believable and engaging, especially mute Adah whose words are those of a sensuous, awe-struck, and non-judgemental poet.

Nathan, whose damaged psyche, guilt, and inflexible beliefs are the trigger for everything, is only ever known through the words of the women he despises. Unfair or karma? Giving him a single chapter would seem tokenistic, and equal billing would unbalance the whole book. I think the way Kingsolver has written it rectifies the imbalance of his long-term power over the women in the story.

For Better or Worse

“The hardest work of every day was deciding, once again, to stay with my family. They never even knew.”

Orleanna is married to a man who does not, and probably never could love her. She is pained that “The thing you love more than this world grew from a devil’s seed”, but loves her very different children regardless. She wrestles with whether and how to leave Nathan, considering the consequences for the girls. With hindsight, she wonders what she was guilty of: complicity, loyalty, stupefaction? But she was a victim, too.

That abusive marriage is beautifully contrasted with a tender, devoted couple. They struggle for mere survival and are often forced apart, sometimes for long periods, but their love and commitment never waver. As with freedom and forgiveness, the difficulty is not merely finding love, but recognising it and then daring to grasp it and cling to it.

Themes

I expect different themes dominate, depending on the individual circumstances of each reader. I could write a whole review focusing on any one of these:

•tThe circle of life, eating and being eaten, survival. “Alive, nobody matters much in the long run. But dead, some men matter more than others.”

•tThe butterfly effect: “The sting of a fly… can launch the end of the world.” And “Every life is different because you passed this way.”

•tNature, nurture, how landscape shapes peoples, despite their attempts to shape it.

•tSin, original sin (snakes), sins of the Father and consequences - for individuals, but also in terms of colonialism, reparations, freedom.

•tGuilt, judgement and privilege, especially survivor guilt and white privilege. Everyone here is burdened with guilt, mostly of an unnecessary kind or degree. “God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us enough life to punish ourselves.”

•tThe Bible, faith (and loss of), religion: life insurance or life sentence; life-jacket or straitjacket? Truth versus intention of the Bible and God.

•tLanguage, (mis)translation, misunderstanding, wordplay (especially Malapropisms (circus-mission for circumcision!) and palindromes), and literalism – or not – in interpreting the Bible.

•tPolysemy and poisonwood. “Mbote… means hello and goodbye, both.” Dundu is a kind of antelope, a particular plant, a hill, or the “price you have to pay”. The words of “baptism” and “to terrify” sound almost the same. And most disastrously for Nathan, bangala means most precious (Jesus), most insufferable – and poisonwood.

•tRacism - both ways.

•tOpposites, balance, reversal, palindromes, mirrors, ying/yang, pairs, twins.

•tFreedom, liberty, independence – and their cost.

•tEducation: its importance, and especially the need to understand (rather than merely know). “Our hardest task is teaching people to count on a future.”

•tClash of cultures: “Africa swallowed the conqueror’s music and sang a new song of her own.” The need to adapt, and the disastrous consequences of not doing so. “It’s like he’s trying to put rubber tires on a horse” but there are no horses in the Congo, “The point I was trying to make was so true there was not even a good way to say it.”

•tThe role of women: in their own right, but also as wives and mothers.

•tConsumerism, agriculture, colonialism, war, politics, the environment.

•tListening, watching, eavesdropping (“The Eyes in the Trees”): by God, animals, and fellow humans - alive and dead. One of Rachel’s better Malapropisms is “false-eye dolls”.

•tDisability and identity. Disability may “not be entirely one’s fault” but one should have the “good manners to act ashamed” in the face of “the arrogance of the able-bodied”. Yet, being “cured” might not be a blessing.

•tChange, adaptation, and finding one's true self - the character development is really well done. “To live is to be marked. To live is to change. To acquire the words of a story.”

•tLove, loyalty, sacrifice, hope.

•tSymbolism, prophesy, foreboding: Biblical (of course), but others, too, such as the “hope chests” the girls prepare for future marriage: one sees no need, one applies black borders, one does it carefully, and another doesn’t do it at all. Also colonialism of Africa having parallels with individual people.


Sensual and Synaesthetic Quotes

•t"She can feel the touch of his long, curled tongue on the water's skin, as if he were lapping from her hand."

•t“Rainy-season light in my eyes and Congo grit in my teeth.”

•t“Emily Dickinson: No snikcidy lime, a contrary name with a sourgreen taste... She liked herself best in darkness, as do I."

•tBright fabrics “worn together in jangling mixtures that ring in my ears”.

•t“Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.”

•t“Once every few years, even now, I catch the scent of Africa.”

•t“While my husband’s intentions crystallized as rock salt… the Congo breathed behind the curtain of the forest, preparing to roll over us like a river.”

•t“All those smells were so loud in my ears.”

•t“The silk texture of that cool air, the smell of Congolese earth curling its toes under a thatch of dead grass.”


Other Quotes

•t"Consecrate myself in the public library."

•t“Here, bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living, not a disgrace… I enjoy a benign approval… that I have never, ever known in Bethlehem, Georgia.”

•t“Sending a girl to college is like pouring water on your shoes.”

•t“Whatever happens… Father acts like it’s a movie he’s already seen and we’re just dumb for not knowing how it comes out.”

•t“To save my sanity, I learned to pad around hardship in soft slippers and try to remark on its good points.”

•t“The buzzards rise from the leafless billboard tree and flap away like the sound of old black satin dresses beating together.”

•t“I am the smooth, elegant black cat who slips from the house as a liquid shadow… With my own narrow shadow for a boat I navigate the streams of moonlight that run between shadow islands.”

•t“The radio a live mass of wires oozing from his trunk, a seething congregation of snakes.”

•t“Yellow leaves… littering the ground like a carpet rolled out for the approaching footsteps of the end of time.”

•t“The sun hung low on the river, seemingly reluctant to enter this strange day. Then it rose redly into the purpled sky, resembling a black eye.”

•t“Chasing flames that passed hungrily over the startled grass.”

•t“As long as I kept moving my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me.”

•tEven in solitude, there are “exploding moments” of unexpected “companionship and joy” such as “A kiss of flesh-coloured sunrise while I hung out the washing, a sigh of indigo birds exhaled from the grass.”

•t“By [X] I was shattered and assembled, by way of [X] I am delivered not out of my life but through it. Love changes everything.” Inadvertently echoing Nathan’s belief that God delivers us not from suffering, but through it.

•t“I recite the Periodic Table… like a prayer; I take my exams as Holy Communion, and the passing of the first semester was a sacrament.”

•t“Carry us, marry us, ferry us, bury us: those are our four ways to exodus, for now.”


For a very different take on the missionary experience, see Michel Faber's interplantary, The Book of Strange New Things, reviewed HERE.


Image source “The Trees Have Eyes” by Angela Wright:
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/th...

This was a wonderfully written story that was difficult to read. The prose and characterization was great but the subject matter was pretty rough. And by that I mean the situation the characters find themselves in and what they have to endure is rough. This book also serves as an examination of the American experience and impact on the Congo during the 1960's.

The story revolves around a family of American missionaries who travel to the Congo (which was still under Belgian administration) to spread the good word of Jesus to the natives. The family comprised the father, mother, and four daughters (Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May). The story is hold as a rotating narrative by the four daughters with occasional passages by the mother told after the events of the story take place.

Right off the bat you know things will not go well given the disposition of the father. Namely, not the sort of man who views females as worthwhile people ("Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes...It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.”). He was the driving force behind the move to the Congo even though everyone, including their church, cautioned strongly against it. But he would not be denied and viewed himself as a sanctified and protected man of God.

If you are unaware Congo has a really screwed up history. Mostly it was at the hands of the Belgians. It basically served as King Leopald II's private domain where natives were abused and exploited to create wealth for the Belgian crown. The conditions were so inhumane the rest of Europe forced him to give up the territory to the Belgian civil government. When early 20th century Europe thinks you are treating the natives to inhumanely you KNOW some terribly atrocities are going down. Not that the civil government was much better. Congo served merely as a place to extract wealth and natural resources. Little to no investments were made in the native population and atrocities continued on the rubber plantations and mines.

It was fascinating seeing the experience of the family through the eyes of the daughters. They all had a very different reactions and the writing really illustrated their different voices and perspectives. Rachel, the oldest, was the most resentful having been taken from a life of material abundance (relatively speaking) to dirt poverty in a strange land. Leah idolized her father and did her best to follow in his foot steps. Adah, Leah's twin sister but who suffered somewhat in the womb and walks with a limp, took a very detached academic view of their new circumstances. Ruth May, a very young girl, took to the situation with gusto and enthusiasm.

It is rather evident that the family is in no way prepared for their new environment. From packing absurd things to now knowing how to properly plant crops, to now even knowing the language they (or at least the father) are the very epitome of the ugly Americans. They did not understand the social structure of the village they moved to or the native beliefs. They effectively stumbled about socially until they slowly learned how things worked in the village and Congo. Well, except for the father, who acts like a bull in a China shop, not caring about anything except for his mission to convert the village to Jesus.

The family very much parallels the Western experience during the Congo Crisis which unfolds during the course of the story. The Western powers didn't view the Congo as an entity or its people as worthy of determining their own course. Congo was viewed as an underdeveloped country that was incapable of making decisions for itself (of course the fact that Belgian did all they could to keep the population uneducated and exploited never entered consideration) so when the new popularly elected government of Congo turns to the Soviets for assistance the West freaks out (though, it should be noted, this occurred after various Western powers supported a secessionist movement in Congo) and funded the over throw of the freely elected government to be replaced by one of history's worst and most corrupt regimes.

Like the family the Western powers really did not have or care to have an understanding of Congolese society, caring more about achieving their own ends regardless of what the Congolese wanted. They were both bulls in a china shop, the only difference was scope and power between the two.

But the real strength of this book is how strong the characterization is. The writing is extremely effective in conveying the internal state of mind and views of the characters. As the story unfolds (and it unfolds over several decades) we can clearly see how the characters change, why they change, and how that impacts the relationships they have. They all change drastically and in fascinating ways. The path their lives take are deeply tied to their experience in Congo. In fact I think I enjoyed the parts of the book after the family left Congo because of what Kingsolver did with the characters and how they evolved.

All in all this was a nuanced, beautifully written, and deeply moving story about both coming of age and how people process traumas from their youth. An excellent read for those interested in historical fictions or Africa.

Reviewing in the face of the great billows of love projected towards this novel is a hapless task, your hat blows off and your eyes get all teary and if you say one wrong thing small children run out of nowhere and stone you or just bite your calves. So I shall this one time sheathe my acid quill. But I can't resist just a couple of little points though -

1) you have to suspend great balefuls of disbelief. These kids, they're awfully highfalutin with their fancy flora and fauna and fitful forensic philosophising. And the mother is worse, you can see where they get it from.

2) I don't care for the historical novel/film cliche where a character rushes in and clues us up to the bigger picture - "Have you heard, Sophie? War has broken out between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Turks, the English fleet has just been sunk, the king has fled and we have a new Pope" "Why Sir Marmalade Gin-Rummy, you don't say so, and how is the Queen?" "The Queen has syphilis and now barks like a very dog" etc etc.

3) For 350 pages the writing is lovely and the recreation of one tiny corner of the Congo convinced me. Ah if it was only all like that, then we could remain friends and there would be no tears before bedtime.

4) After that it goes really wrong. I mean, seriously.

5) But 350 pages can't be denied. It's more than you get from most books.

This book was fascinating for a variety of reasons for me. Not only is it set in the jungles of Congo, but the structure really sucked me in so much more than a lot of books. Barbara Kingsolver obviously spent a lot of time researching this book (according to the P.S. text, a couple of decades)--there's a huge list of references used, and the details within the text made me feel almost as if I'd actually been to a little town deep within the jungles of Congo.

Kingsolver had a very nice variety of character perspectives, rather than telling the story all from one person's point-of-view. All of the daughters have very different voices, as well as the mother. Leah is the most trusting of her father's preaching, and for a good chunk of the novel spends her time doting on her father and not really realizing how wrong he was on a lot of things. Rachel gets fairly annoying at times, with how stuck-up she can be, but in the end I did like her for her honesty. Adah, the "twisted child," is very poetic and I found myself looking forward to her passages the most, with her play-on-words and general pessimistic take on the whole situation. Ruth May felt a lot like a filler character at times, although in the end I did appreciate her innocent take on everything.

I actually learned a few things about the Congo by reading this--it's not an area I knew much about (just generals that are commonly known, like the diamond trade), so it was a bit of a history lesson mixed in with a very interesting story.

I was a bit iffy of the final 150-ish pages, where it seemed like the story was over...but it kept going. In the end, I was really glad Kingsolver decided to do the rest of the story in the way she did--in those 150 pages, she covers about 30 years of the after-effects on the family. You never get the full story of what happened to certain characters, but in a time of turmoil like that you wouldn't in reality...so it works. It's pretty interesting to see how much some of the daughters changed after the horrible failure of their father's mission, and how very little one daughter changed. It turned into more than a story of a failed Baptist preacher attempting to convert the members of a little Congolese town, but a story of the long-reaching effects of one man.

Definitely a powerful book, and I'm so glad I picked it up on a whim! It was slow-going most of the time (it took me much longer to read this than I expected--more out of savoring it than it being a difficult read, because it was definitely easy yet poetic language), but it was definitely worth the effort.