Review for You - The Poisonwood Bible

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
3 Stars

This was an intense read to say the least. I mean, the book literally just kind of kept chugging along. And parts would kind of just jump out and hit you in the face and make you feel miserable. Others would make you sit down and think really long and hard.

It was my first Kingsolver book and while it was a good one, and while I will say a very important book in feminist literature, I’m not going to call it a favorite or anything. It’s the story of the Price Family who is lead by their preacher father, Nathan, to the Congo in 1960 to head up the mission there in the small village of Kilanga. The four daughters (Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May, in order of age) could not be more different from one another and each speak in their own voice throughout the novel. Nathan is ALL about the Bible and thinks they’ve literally come to the darkest Africa to save these savages from themselves and his whole goal is to baptize every last one of the villagers in the river. Little does he know that the likelihood of that happening is next to zero thanks to the friendly crocodiles that the villagers are rightfully afraid of. I think one recently at one of the villagers actually. Good luck Father Price! Not to mention the fact that they have their own values and customs and religion and do not need some white savior to come in to rescue them. Nathan Price is a violent man and pig-headed and refuses to accept the fact that his mission is a failure. His wife, Orleanna, tries her best not to step on his toes until she realizes that staying in the Congo will probably mean the end of her family, in a very very real sense.

Living in the Congo changes each of the daughters in ways they could not imagine and it’s really a story of them growing up and apart from one another and out of the shadow of their boorish father. So the theme was certainly intriguing, and that’s why I say it was certainly a feminist read. And the way it was set up was unique. Each chapter was in a different point of view. One would be from Leah’s, then Adah’s, etc. Also each section of the book opened from the point of view of their mother, as if she’s trying to explain to them how she could have lived with such an abusive and horrible man such as their father. Those are very interesting from a psychological perspective.


Of course, it has a lot of xenophobia and sexism intentionally mixed in. The story takes so many different routes throughout its many pages it’s kind of hard to nail down. I think the main problem I had with it was that Kingsolver did not seem to know where she wanted to end it, or how she wanted to end. It. The majority of the book is about the family’s time at the mission just before the Congo declared independence and shortly thereafter. But then it kept dragging on for another 150 pages and I think kept going until the late 1980s. I understand that Kingsolver was trying to bring the reader up to date on the struggles in Africa and the girls’ journeys but I felt it tedious at many points. The last chapters were basically the daughters giving their own opinions on things, as it should be with this kind of book I think, but really the only one I found that added anything to the novel was Rachel’s chapter. Since she was basically one-note during the whole book I think her final chapter gave a new insight into her, otherwise it was more of the same from every other character. Another reason it dragged down at the end.


So it was disappointing that I couldn’t rate this book higher, having heard so many great things about it. Not that I didn’t like it, I did. I just felt it could have been, should have been, better.