— Literary Fiction —
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
— 1998 —
“
Kingsolver's 1998 novel follows a Baptist missionary who drags his wife and four daughters into the Belgian Congo on the eve of its independence, then watches his certainties rot in the heat.
Decide its fate
⚖The case for it
Five narrators, and Nathan Price is not one of them, so a Baptist missionary gets defined entirely by the wife and four daughters he dragged to the Congo. Each sister carries her own verbal signature: Rachel’s malapropisms, Leah’s idealism, Ruth May’s child logic, and Adah, mute and thinking in palindromes, whom readers name the most inventive of them. The year in Kilanga is the best writing in the book, down to the garden planted in American rows with seeds that will not pollinate. Readers call them “Shakespearen quality characters” in “an engrossing saga full of memorable characters, vivid set pieces.”
— the honest librarian
✕The case against
Nathan is “entirely hideous” and nothing besides, a stand-in for colonial and religious arrogance rather than a man, and readers on both sides wish Kingsolver had given him one chapter to hang himself with. The politics arrive pre-decided, “overly preachy, critical, and completely disrespectful to its characters.” Christian readers add that his theology is a garble of Baptist, Catholic and apocryphal pieces no actual Southern Baptist minister would hold. The book also keeps going long after it peaks, “climaxing on page 385 of 543,” and the decades after Kilanga lose the focus the village year had. The daughters philosophise past their ages.
— the honest librarian
12h
honest hours
17
sittings
beyond the verdict
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