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I thought the writing was great but it could have had the last 150-200 pages removed. It really dragged on after a while. ( )

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. ( )

It's the rare novel that does more than just entertain, which instead causes one to sit back and reflect, to ask to learn more, to seek to have one's preconceptions challenged.
This one is one of those novels.
Set in a time of geopolitical flux, we find ourselves at first rooting for and then grieving after the events of the lives of the family thrust into a situation that changes them, disrupts their lives, and spits them back out.
Satisfyingly emotional and gratifyingly intense. ( )

April AM reading group

what an incredible story. the world and the people came alive from the first page. I felt their confusion and curiosity. I loved the story unfolding from each of their views

but as a mother, this was by far one of the hardest books I have read in a long time. They warn you, all through-out the book...

and yet, when it came, I just wasn't ready.

And no matter what the mother in the story says, not once did I ever wrong her. Not once did I blame her. ( )

I give this book 2 stars.

The first time I read this book I really loathed it (only 1 star). The writing was terrific, but the plot and characters were lacking for me. I became so distracted by my loathing for the father that I just couldn't get past it. We'll see how it goes second time around when I re-read it for the Challenge.

Well, second time was better than the first. I still loathed the character of the father (Nathan), but was able to set those feelings aside. The twins, Adah and Leah were most appealing to me ~ their stories and their voices. Orleanna, the mother, was alright but didn't impact me the way the twins did. The youngest daughter, Ruth May, was written well and I enjoyed how it was Ruth May who was the first to be accepted by the children of the village. The oldest daughter, Rachel, was a pain-in-the-butt and I don't think she really added any depth to the story, being so shallow. I do get the point of her story arc, but she was completely irritating.

The history of the Congo is a complicated story to weave into a fictional tale. I think Kingsolver did a reasonable job, but overall I wasn't "WOWED" with this novel. ( )

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history

This is a story about the Prices, a family from Georgia, USA, taken by an evangelistic and authoritarian patriarch to Congo. Spanning about three decades, Kingsolver uses the voices of the wife and daughters to show their experiences in Congo and how the land and its people permanently change their lives.

Revolving around the struggle for independence, a near secession, a coup, a murder organized by strong world powers to eliminate a democratically elected leader, and the rise and fall of a dictator, the book tries to explain some history of Congo while the writer excellently and seamlessly weaves through one point of narration to another.

I believe that a story that is told of people that have been underrepresented and misrepresented, should primarily be told by the people. However, Kingsolver manages to tell a great story with a humanity and understanding and with none of the condescending that is common in African stories told through foreign eyes.

One of the other quotes I loved from the book: Illusions mistaken for the truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization ( )

I have so much to say about this book, and yet, do I really want to spend a lot of time on a book I’ve already spent over a month getting through?

Gosh I hated this book.

The author writes beautiful prose. The setting would be great to read about if I could appreciate it through all the nonsense blotting it out. I can’t stand her characters, the villains were cartoony and the heroes were mostly villains anyway.

This book is incredibly hateful towards white people (particularly Americans) and Christians (the only characters portrayed as good Christians, with the exception of some briefly mentioned nuns, are those who don’t actually have any interest in the basic tenets of Christianity) and somehow manages to be just as bad towards Congolese people and Africans in general.

The basic attitude seems to be that black people have to murder their babies by exposure, have multiple wives, and die of disease to preserve the good of things from the Evil European/American Christian Devils. Oh, and the reason that they didn’t invent the wheel or develop agriculture is that they’re too well informed about the unique climes of Africa to try things which won’t work. So, basically, unless you can stomach agreeing with hero-villain Leah that basic morals are different for blacks and whites, or with the hero-villain Adah that diseases killing African children are really a good thing, you’re left with the conclusion that Barbara Kingsolver thinks Africans are stupid barbarians.

Well, that’s what I should expect from people who uncritically praise communism, I guess. Repeatedly.

I wrote more of this review but it got deleted and since I already feel bummed about it, never mind. This book sucked. I wish I’d quit when I was ahead. Barbara Kingsolver may describe Okapi vomit beautifully, but it’s still vomit in the end. ( )

I really enjoyed this novel and found myself reading it compulsively, however I still prefer [b:The Lacuna|6433752|The Lacuna|Barbara Kingsolver|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1480104396s/6433752.jpg|6812077]. ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ fits quite neatly with my recent reading of [b:Heart of Darkness|117837|Heart of Darkness|Joseph Conrad|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1317686353s/117837.jpg|2877220] and [b:King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa|347610|King Leopold's Ghost|Adam Hochschild|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348621563s/347610.jpg|937922]. It tells the story of four sisters and their parents who go to the Congo as missionaries. I thought the voices were very well differentiated. I enjoyed Leah’s distinctive energy, Rachel’s word confusion, Adah’s mysterious archness, and Ruth May’s innocence, although the chapters narrated by their mother had a slightly strange mysticism. Nathan, the family patriarch, remained a hateful enigma and a powerful personification of colonial attitudes. The portrait of Congo was vivid and heart-breaking, as the optimism of independence gave way to violence and exploitation. Overall this is a powerful novel, rightly recommended and especially notable for its excellent character voices and depiction of sisterly relationships. As an account of the tragedy of the Congo, though, it is inadequate as it gives only a white perspective. ( )

I can see why Oprah liked it, women dominate the narrative. The story weaves the history and their lives very well. ( )

This suffered from too many POV's for me ( )

I love Barbara Kingsolver, but I had a horrible time getting through this book. :( ( )

Read this for a book group and loved it. ( )

I liked this a lot, she's a great writer. It didn't really speak to me, though. ( )

This book has sat on my shelves for some twenty years without my getting round to it. I tend to shy away from 600 pages, and from 'must reads'. In the event, I demolished it in under two days. This family saga is told from the perspectives of the wife, and the four daughters of a focused, unforgiving American evangelical pastor, Nathan Price. It paints an extraordinary picture of life in an isolated and (from the family's original point of view) primitive African community in the then Belgian Congo. Kingsolver immerses us in the detail of their first difficult year of hardship, then walks us slightly more briskly forward through 30 years of strife, conflict and post-colonialism. The family members are believably from the same stock, but very different one from another, which gives the opportunity to see several sides of the same history. This book is brilliantly realised, well told, and paints a picture of a conflict which was never far from the news in my childhood, but of which I knew little and understood less. It's also a picture of what happens when issues round religion, politics and race relations are unable to find compromise and mutual understanding. A powerful and ambitious tale. ( )

This book is great and I'm glad I FINALLY got around to reading it. Docking one star (probably unfairly) because it took me forever to read the whole thing. I don't understand why because I always enjoyed the time I spent within it's pages but it seemed like it might go on forever.

The story is told in alternating chapters in the POV of the five Price women who come to Africa as a missionary family in the mid-50s. Mostly, we are with the daughters, and they each have a VERY distinctive manor about them that makes it very simple to keep things straight between them. The writing is beautiful and I learned quite a bit about African history and I'm reminded about how little I really know about the world.

( )

Absorbing, horrifying story of a man who sacrifices his wife and four daughters to his insatiable need for a redemption he will never find. I was heartbroken for the mother who spends the rest of her life begging her youngest daughter for forgiveness. ( )

This book is beautifully written and each of the characters has a very distictive voice. THe sroty was facinating, and I loved the texture of the jungle and the lives of these people. I did get tired of it near the end, very little happened in the last 1/3. ( )

Review: The Poison Bible by Barbara Kingsolver 3* 09/18/2023

This is a fictional story about Nathan Price a Christian Missionary who took Orleanna, his wife, and his four daughters, Rachel, the twins Leah and Adah, and their youngest Ruth to the Congo in 1959. He is on an assignment to try and convert all the Congolese to Christianity to save their souls. Nathan could have been more friendly to the people in the village they were staying at. He also treated his family unkindly, especially when there were no modern elements which he never mentioned to his family. He couldn't understand why the people who were of African descent were scared of the narrow river when he wanted them to get in the river to baptize them while there were crocodiles in the water. He wasn't a friendly character in the story.
The people were forbidden to be educated but still managed to survive the environment within their community. Kingsolver organized the flow of the story well. I was three-fourths through the book and I started getting bored. It felt like too many things were going on at the same time. I did learn some things about the Congo that I never knew. The Price family became victims of life itself even the horrible father. The mother is the only one who changed her life. I thought it was a sad story. ( )

I had a very difficult time settling into this book but enjoyed it more once the characters were narrating as adults. I'm glad I stuck with it and always appreciate books that provide some insight about less familiar global history. Frequency bias is common for me when I read historical fiction so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when one of my regular podcasts mentioned the Church Committee and Lumumba the day after I finished reading this and then I stumbled upon a poem by William Carlos Williams (Adah's favorite poet). So even though I liked/didn't love, this one may stay with me. ( )

Yep, very good. Recommended. Made me go and look up some African history; and want to reread Mosquito Coast for comparison. Maybe a couple of characters deserved to be fleshed out a bit better, but the good bits are very good. Would have liked to give 3 1/2 stars. ( )

I adore Barbara Kingsolvers' works - all of them; but this is not my favorite. It's between The Lacuna, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle..... ( )

This is an exceptionally good novel. The story of a missionary and his family who travel from backwoods Georgia to the even more primitive and God-forsaken Belgian Congo has echoes of Joseph Conrad but they are unobtrusive and serve to highlight the book's originality. The novel is told in chapters, with each in the voice of either the Mother, Orleana, or one of the four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May. The father, Nathan Price, is the most Conradian character who bears a heavy cross of guilt from his experience as the lone survivor of a massacre that wiped out his battalion. The story moves across the ocean a few times and within Africa but it never loses its momentum or focus. Biblical references abound to good effect. The characters are extremely well-drawn and voiced. This This 614 page novel, covering four decades, is a long journey, but it is not without humor and the writing climbs to brilliant heights in several chapters. The frequent changes in narrator keeps the energy high. Looking forward to reading more Kingsolver. A native of Appalachia, she might have had her region in mind for some of this story. ( )

I've read this book twice and it remains on my top ten list. Kingsolver reveals to story through the distinct voices of five sisters in a way that is mesmerizing. ( )

The writing made the characters so real to me that I just wanted to shout at them and shake them into seeing what the hell was really going on. This book made me furious, and I highly recommend it to all. ( )