Avoidable Self-Abuse

Women put up with a great deal from men. This is a truism which can’t be reinforced too frequently, if only to remind women that they often collaborate with masculine arrogance to their own - and the world’s - disadvantage. Getting out from under, as it were, requires hitting them where it hurts - not in the private parts but in the intimacies of family life. Essentially, men have no defense against feminine dismissal of their pretensions as merely foolish.

Most of the common male presumptions are contained in The Poisonwood Bible - superior intellect, more serious spiritual existence, greater ability to organise and act, and a keener insight about what it takes to survive in the world. These are observed, suffered, and analysed by a family of four girls who are dragooned with their mother to a remote mission station in the Congo in the early 1960’s. They submit because they have been taught to do so. Submission is a requirement of their interpretation of love, loyalty, and family commitment.

Reverend Paterfamilias is of course incompetent in every aspect of the family’s African endeavour. From his doctrinaire dismissal of local culture, to his refusal to take advice on gardening, he is a persistent failure. The women compensate. The man considers he has learned. He hasn’t. He remains as fundamentally ignorant as he has always been.

“Our Father“, as the disabled daughter refers to him sarcastically, is a misogynistic religious fanatic who would crumble into a heap of ash without the constant hidden and unappreciated support by his female family members and the other women of the village they inhabit. The Reverend is yet another species of animal which thrives in Africa: the parasite.

It takes their African life and its cultural dislocation to demonstrate to the women just how parasitical the man is. Their experience slowly relativises the certainties of their previous cultural existence. From the rationalisation of racism, to the Calvinist mores of work and dress, to the subtleties of their own subservience, they begin to recognise the elements of the cultural prison which encloses them and the oppressive tactics of their chief warder.

“How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness.” This is the point of revelation for the Reverend’s wife. Unlike her husband, she recognises her true helplessness, her profound vulnerability to the world as it is without the mythical protections of either religion or technology. She also begins to understand that most of those purported protections are beneficial not to her but to her husband.

One by one all the women of the family come to recognise the sole male as the exploitative fool he is. “Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.” Is how one daughter puts it. In fact he was wrong anyplace, as many men are, men who wield power, who coerce and make victims of those who do not. They need not be fundamentalist preachers of course; but they generally have the same kind of ambition to dominate.

Oddly, this realisation leads to guilt. In part perhaps because it is as much about the culture from which they have emerged and to which they will not return. But mainly because their historic subjugation has led to avoidable tragedy. They should have known better than to have confidence in this man and his delusions. They couldn’t, of course, without the experiences he had imposed upon them. Hence the paradoxical guilt.

wonderfully written and surprisingly engaging masterpiece, illustrating the fluidity of perspective, the strength of women, and the damage that greed and possessiveness can inflict. very strong and individualistic characterizations for each of the narrative voices. understanding of a certain place and time in the Congo comes slowly but steadily to the reader and never feels forced. although kingsolver's liberal tendencies are clear, to me at least they do not unbalance the novel - except perhaps in the depiction of the minister/father. overall a novel of wisdom and beauty, well worth re-reading.

The Poisonwood Bible was certainly one of the best narratives about Africa that I have read in a very very long time. I give it five stars for the excellent research, writing style, narrative and insight. As a novel it managed to include a wealth of information on interpersonal relationships, political and religious issues and African culture. It took some guts to pinpoint the issues between different races, cultures and countries involved in Africa in such a way that the truth, which is underscored by various historical sources, and many of them, upset the readers to such an extent that many reviews are more shocked outbursts of anger than anything else. But for born Africans, both black and white, the narrative is well known, very familiar and very true!

The Price family's involvement in different aspects of African life after their disastrous beginning in the Congo as a missionary family, was an excellent way to tell more than one story which are all connected to a grave in the deepest forests of the Congo.

I was not convinced of the children's voices in the book. It was clearly voices created by an adult, but it did not hamper the spellbinding narrative to keep the reader engrossed in the story.

Although Tata Price was a missionary, he could have been anything else and still had the devastating influence on everyone around him due to his controlling brutal ignorant, unbending personality. He also could have been German, British, Portuguese, French, or even (nowadays) Chinese. The serious colonization of Africa started with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, at which the most powerful European countries agreed upon rules for laying claim to particular African territories, the British, French, Germans, Italians, Spanish, Belgians, and Portuguese set about formally implementing strategies for the long-term occupation and control of Africa.

In 'Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham, an even more detailed story unfolds of events in Africa that would ultimately conclude in the final revolt starting in 1960 on the continent itself. But it wasn't the beginning of the African revolt at all. The first successful African Revolution took place in Haiti (1791 -1804) and was inspired by the French Revolution(1787-99) so by the way.

The Americans, therefor, were not the only 'culprit' or even the biggest one. The book should have pointed that out in some or other way. But of course it would have made the narrative too tedious and would not have fitted quite into the story.

However, spilled milk is spilled milk. It's good to know more about history and learn through novels about other countries. Insight is always a good thing. Africa is also not the only continent which was concurred throughout thousands of years and certainly won't be the last. Whatever happened, the role of the missionaries were manyfold. But the lasting legacy is their ability to educate people. Of all the different conquerors through the ages, Christianity, no matter how it was done, introduced intellectual freedom through education everywhere it went and was the forerunner of free societies all over the world.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote a great book and skillfully introduced many aspects of African life to readers who would otherwise not have obtained this information. She also highlighted the true rulers of Africa - which is not the democratically elected Black leaders in power on the continent at all.

It is one of those books that every single person who benefits from Africa's wealth in minerals, oil, and any other products should read!!! And that is just about the entire world!

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant book!!!!

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

Review of the audio.

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.

“The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.”

This book follows the Reverend Nathan Price and his family; his wife, Ordelia and four children: Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May. Nathan Price becomes a missionary and moves his family deep into the Congo, far from their home lives in Atlanta, to teach those in the village the ways of believing in the one "true" God. Upon arrival the Congo is completely different to their typical way of life, and through the eyes of the women in the family, particularly those of the daughters, we get to imagine their experiences of a different culture and obstacles they face.

This book markedly points out the differences of life of those from being comfortable in the USA to a different lifestyle in the Congo. Not only is the culture and environment a complete shock, but also society is completely different to what the Price family is used to.

This book had beautiful writing and vivid descriptions, especially those of nature and detailing the atmosphere of Congo. This is a compelling read based on family, loneliness, identity, religion and loss.

This book is set around the de-colonisation of the Congo and the years that proceed after it with political tensions running high. It shows the girls when they first arrive, to when some of them leave the Congo and what becomes of them. Not only detailing in the history of the Congo during the 1950's- 1980's and the political tensions arising from it with America's involvement, but also tensions within the family. It is obvious at the start that Nathan Price is thoroughly devout in his religion, using it as punishment for his children if they behave in a way he deems inappropriately. We also witness the differences and tensions among the sisters, all of whom have completely different and often conflicting personalities.

While I say that this book didn't have a happy ending, it had instead a very realistic one instead, as each female in the Price family offer deep reflection of their time in the Congo and the effect this had on them for the decisions in their lives.

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.

One of my favorite books of all time. If you like a solid read, a well-developed plot and characters, this book is it. Kingsolver--I love her writing style! Smart, funny, compassionate, gritty...and her storytelling skills are supreme. This is a longer read, but I've always preferred a thicker book to shorter novels. But this one I've actually read several times, and each time I find something new to love and appreciate.

'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver is an important book, one which should be on everyone’s TBR list. On Goodreads there are 666,825 ratings and 23,525 reviews. The novel was a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, the Orange Prize, the Book Sense Book of the Year Award for Adult, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Independent Publisher Book Award for Audio, the Exclusive Books Book Prize, the Puddly Award for Novel, the International Dublin Literary Award - and it won several of the above. There are also thousands of book reviews online written by professional literary critics.

In my more humble opinion, it is a magnificent novel. It is Kingsolver’s magnum opus, her Les Miserables contender. It is a multi-dimensional statement about Human Folly. It also has many other literary themes, with perhaps the one main one of spirituality and its many faces, which makes it perfect for book clubs and other discussion groups.

Some readers believe the novel is anti-missionary or anti-religious, but I think her book was more nuanced and Big Picture than that. I think Kingsolver was demonstrating the uselessness of a certain type of Christian missionary. She was not condemning the entire group, only those self-proclaimed religious messengers who have no real religious training or cultural expertise, or who are focused on a single aspect of an organized religion to the exclusion of all other considerations. At one point, it is revealed Nathan Price, the keystone character who sets in motion the tragedy of the Price family’s disillusionment with their father, and more, went to Africa and took over the small Kilanga mission without sanction of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Service.

The Service did give Price a small monthly stipend of $50 a month, but they did it reluctantly because he had refused to attend the classes he needed on living in the Belgian Congo in 1959. He never learned any African language. He knew nothing of what supplies he needed. He dragged his family of wife and four daughters to a village in the middle of a jungle without having done a single thing (except for a few vaccines) to prepare them for an African country very different from Bethlehem, Georgia, their previous home.  As the story unfolds through the alternating narratives of Nathan’s wife, Orleanna Price, and of his four daughters, fifteen-year-old Rachel, fourteen-year-old twins Leah and Adah, and five-year-old Ruth May, three years of hell pass. The stipend is stopped when the Belgian Congo won its independence in 1960. Nathan refuses to leave despite recommendations of fellow Baptist missionaries, despite the breaking out of civil wars, and despite the threat to the lives of all White people in the Congo, many of whom are murdered after the Congo’s declaration of independence.

The things Nathan cannot accept are legion. He doesn’t recognize the physical needs, like food, of anyone, including those of his family. He does not recognize that the concept of God comes in many packages around the world. To Nathan, spirituality exists only in one face - that of the Old Testament God of the Christian Bible. Although he is Baptist, he rejects the approved Baptist Bible which does not include the Catholic books called the Apocrypha. He is focused, to the exclusion of all other expressions of spirituality, only on the ritual of baptism no matter what environment he finds himself. He cannot convince the people of Kilanga being baptized is more important than being eaten by crocodiles.

Nathan is clearly deranged, but it takes his family a long time to understand this. Eventually, Nathan’s monomaniac interest on baptizing African polytheists costs him his family, his honor, and his sanity. The question of survival becomes the issue. Will Orleanna, Rachael, Leah, Adah and Ruth May get out of Africa alive? What caused Nathan’s monomania? How is it that Orleanna married such a man, and even more puzzling, continued her support of his view of Christianity to the point of endangering the lives of her children?

Poisonwood is a local plant which kills unwary people. Touching it burns the skin, and using it as firewood or food will kill. The family has a painful run-in with the plant since they have no clue about local flora or fauna.

The Price family assumes they can plant Georgia crops in African soils, but of course, that ends up a disaster. Besides the fast-growing native jungle environment, there is the different seasonal environment of the Congo. It is has two seasons - rainy and dry. The Price family had never heard of rainy and dry seasons. They also didn’t know Kilanga had no refrigeration, no electricity, no indoor or outdoor toilets except bushes, no water except that from streams or rivers. The streams are used as a bathroom, to wash the few articles of clothes people had, and to drink. Only the Price family boils the water. They didn’t know about the crocodiles, the snakes, the bugs, and other wildlife which attack the people of the jungle. They didn’t know how diseases affect the people who must live with them without remedies except that provided by “witchdoctors.” With wonder, they observed many of the people of Kilanga had missing limbs and eyes.

The poverty of Kilanga and other surrounding villages amazed them. The Price family was poor, and they had lived in poverty in America, but they discovered they were wealthy compared to the Africans. Children were mostly naked. Those who wore clothes walked about with holes in the seats of their pants. Only men were allowed to wear pants. Boys finished their education at age twelve. Men hunted, women grew manioc and cooked it. Manioc was the main food, and it did not provide many of the necessary minerals and vitamins for good health. The Price children mistook the bloated bellies of African children for obesity. Two hundred languages were spoken by the various tribes in the Belgian Congo.

Nathan believed the answer to all of the problems of the Congo was baptism. His sermons consisted of the hellfire-fright teachings of the Bible. He threatened eternal damnation and living under the Devil for anyone not accepting Jesus. He denigrated their local gods.

Clearly Nathan was a nihilist except for fundamentalist Christianity, although he would have denied this. He wasn’t interested in the problems of staying alive or in suggesting ways to ease grief, pain and suffering of physical bodies while breathing, only in sending people to heaven after death. He preached only the supposed consolation of being loved by Jesus after the pain of living along with the horrors of eternal damnation. He isn’t the only Christian who believes in preaching Death as the only answer to starvation, poverty, disease and suffering because of the future of being in Heaven. They can’t hear themselves, I think.

His words had to be translated since Nathan didn’t speak the local language at all. He learned a few words eventually, but he never got the hang of the tonal qualities of a word. In mispronouncing bangala, a word that could mean both ‘most precious’ or poisonwood, he continuously preached a message to his small congregation which was confusing. His other messages of ‘love’ were already being understood with outrage. By insisting the villagers throw their kids into a crocodile infested river for baptism, he chased away most of the people who went to his church at least once. In telling them their doctors, whether those of their deities who they had worshipped for pain relief for generations, or the local ‘witchdoctor’ who also provided remedies for pain, grief and fear, were evil, the villagers waited for learning how worshipping Jesus would alleviate their physical sufferings while alive. Of course, Nathan had nothing concrete for that.

Each of the women in the Nathan’s household believed in Nathan, except for Adah. Adah had been born with a crippled right side. Her family was told she had only half of a brain. Later, she mentions polio, but I noticed this sentence is missed by many readers. Adah and Leah are geniuses, and were placed in accelerated learning classes while they lived in America. However, Adah mystifies her family and they ignore her. She never talks. She cannot keep up with the rest of the family when they walk around or work. Her nicknames involve the word “crooked” in all languages. But her narrations make clear she not only is an atheist, she is the only one who realizes Nathan is not ok.

Rachel is unknowingly amusing, and self-centered. She is not a genius. Her mirror is her most precious object. She hates doing anything which will mess up her hair.

Leah is daddy’s girl. She follows him about like a dog in heat. She wants to be him when she grows up. She thinks prayer will solve everything, and she believes if people accept Jesus, their starvation and diseases will be cured. She is also the outdoor kid, accomplished at hunting and living in the woods, strong and fit.

Ruth May is cute, charming and completely accepting of everybody and everything. She walks into neighboring huts full of curiosity and friendliness, and easily makes friends. Her ability at picking up languages is phenomenal. Adah also can do languages, but her family does not pay her much attention as I mentioned before.

Orleanna. She is the character that most interested me. How did she get to be the kind of person who follows a deranged man to Africa, putting her children at risk from horrible death and suffering by local deadly flora and fauna, starvation, disease, racism and civil war? In the beginning the answer is the Baptist religion did it along with extreme ignorance, but later? She slowly decides to trust her own eyes and ears, but omg. It takes a dreadful tragedy to do it. Before then, religious mores blind her and bind her into submission. Nathan beats them all as well. She does nothing about it.

Africa. What is wrong with Africa? The book has so much information about the Congo during the years the family is there. The author gradually reveals the horrors of colonialism. The White world of Europe and America robbed Africa of its resources while promising education, the building of infrastructure and food. Food and educational resources were provided - temporarily, without continuing maintenance. Through bribery of African leaders, White governments killed legitimate African leaders and installed corrupt governments. This, from the same White race which also came to Africa preaching Christianity.

Between wrong-footed Christianity and White promises of wealth, Black Africa was kneecapped by corruption. White people took everything of value and left only an impoverished hell of suffering on the African continent, ultimately only giving the ordinary African the intangible reward of a love from an invisible god after Death.

The novel is wonderful. I highly recommend it. It only misses being a classic with the stature of Great Literature, imho, because one of the characters does not quite measure up - Rachel. Nonetheless, it definitely is great, small g, literature. Some readers thought it prejudiced against Christianity, but I think they didn’t read the book closely enough. Others thought it too supportive of communism, but many African nations and its people believed communism held the answer to redistribution of wealth issues which beset Africa. An author cannot do a history of Africa without including the infatuation with communism many African countries had. At the time (and currently) only the communist states of Russia, Cuba and China offered tangible resources that they followed through on. They provided doctors, roads and dams - practical solutions to practical problems. The help came with strings and racism, along with a lack of consistency and maintenance too, but that came later. The principles of Communism in its teachings definitely appeared a thousand times more attractive than that of gaining a heavenly existence only after one has followed religious rules designed for a desert culture of millennia ago and preaching people must live and die suffering agonies while alive.

There is a bibliography in the back. Plus, the author lived in Africa as a child.

I usually love Barbara Kingsolver (although I think she's gotten a bit self-important, but that's another story), and of course I was looking forward to this book. I learned some about Africa, and I appreciated all her research.

But her characters were false. It was as though Kingsolver had decided what each character would represent and then forced each one to adhere to that representation. For example, one character is supposed to represent Americans in all their materialism and lack of understanding of other cultures, etc., but she makes this character not just blond but stupid and selfish. Now, I'm a brunette and all, but I would think that a more sophisticated (and supposedly feminist) writer could do more than that--it felt distinctly anti-female in her writing.

A little while after I'd read this book, I read an interview in which Kingsolver said she'd had to drag the characters from the mud, kicking and screaming. I think this is the main problem with this book--she didn't allow the characters to be themselves, to let *them* tell *her* who they were or what they were about. And it shows.

Also, the character of Adah seriously got on my last nerve. Don't even get me started.

In late 1950s Congo, an American missionary arrives with his family intent on bringing enlightenment to the savages. The experiences of the family are told by the preacher’s wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters, the vain Rachel, twins Leah, who is devoted to her father, and Adah, damaged at birth but more aware than anyone realizes, and the baby, Ruth Ann. The events take place during a period when Congo was eager to cast off its colonial chains and we see some details of events of the time.


Barbara Kingsolver - from the Guardian

This is a tale not merely about a missionary family in an alien land, but about learning to see what is in plain sight. It is about opening the mind and the heart. We learn about the local culture, good and bad, as well as about the mores of the missionaries.

The father is presented as a mindless faith-robot, determined to convert the heathen while being completely clueless about and uninterested in learning how to actually communicate with them. I would have preferred it had this character been given some more dimension, instead of serving as a stand-in for the arrogance of western cultural imperialism. His family is given a better shake. Through Orleanna’s and the girls eyes we see not only their private struggles and coming of age, but gain insight into and information about the strange world into which they have been thrust. Kingsolver reminds us of the time period with small portraits of local involvement in the independence movement.

I expect that there will be those who reject the novel because it takes an anti-imperialist and anti-missionary perspective, ignoring the aspects of the tale that are critical of local practices as well. But I did not react to this book as a political screed. There is great craft at work here. Kingsolver offers poetic descriptions that I found extremely beautiful, rich and moving. Her main characters were well-realized and accessible, and she succeeded nicely in giving each a very individual voice. The path along which she moves her characters made sense to me and only rarely did I have a tough time accepting her authorial choices.

Overall, this is a terrific book, well-crafted, informative and satisfying.

For any interested in learning about the history of the Congo, particularly as it pertains to Belgium’s role, there is no better read than Adam Hochschild ‘s King Leopold’s Ghost, an outstanding telling of that story.

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

Reviews of other Kingsolver books
-----The Lacuna
-----Flight Behavior
-----Unsheltered

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.