The Poisonwood Bible
By Laura R., Los Osos, CA
Africa: red, organic, wild. To an American raised among picket fences and fruit punch, that land is feral. Its people appear uncivilized, unclean and undesirable. It is a land of famine and flood where hungry ants arrive in swarms, eating every substance in their path, including human flesh. Yet, Africa is full of sense, kindness, and tradition as deep and rich as its people’s skin. Its soil supports a vast array of wildlife and a terrain that does not yield to human hands but shapes them. This is the Africa Barbara Kingsolver writes about in The Poisonwood Bible.
In The Poisonwood Bible, four sisters accompany their defeated mother and fierce, evangelist father on a missionary trip to Kalinga, a rural village in Belgian Congo in 1959. Sanctimonious and ignorant, the Price family arrives with the intention of changing Kalinga, but they soon discover the Congo has its own agenda. As the girls begin to adjust to a world that doesn’t play by their rules, they come to terms with their father’s wrath and the devastating circumstances he has handed them.
Told from the four sisters’ perspectives, The Poisonwood Bible offers a unique array of characters as well as insight into the American dream. It is a book of African history, family tragedy and religious theory, consuming and perceptive. Barbara Kingsolver has given readers her most unique and intelligent novel yet and I highly, highly recommend it.
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