We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle. My sisters and I were all counting on having one birthday apiece during our twelve-month mission.
"And heavens knows," our mother predicted, "they won't have Betty Crocker in the Congo."
"Where we are headed, there will be no buyers and sellers at all," my father corrected. His tone implied that Mother failed to grasp our mission, and that her concern with Betty Crocker confederated her with the coin-jingling sinners who vexed Jesus till he pitched a fit and threw them out of the church.

The Price family is unprepared for their "mission" in every way possible. They don't understand the culture or the language of the Congo. They're unfamiliar with the climate, the flora or the fauna. And they find themselves in the middle of a revolution, which is then sabotaged by the U.S. government. Some of them will never leave the African continent, and all of them will be forever changed by their experiences there.

This is at least the third time I've read this novel, which I consider one of my all-time favorites. The four Price daughters -- Rachael, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May -- take turns telling their family's story from their arrival in the village of Kilanga in 1959 to sometime in the 1990s. Their mother, Orleanna, contributes her own reflections between each section, from a safe distance of years and miles, spending her retirement years on a fictional island off the coast of Georgia. Their father, Nathan Price, a fire-and-brimstone preacher who wants to control the bodies and minds of Kilanga as he does his own family's, is the only member of the family who is never given a voice in the novel. We infer his character from what the women say about him, none of which is good.

I had washed up there on the riptide of my husband's confidence and the undertow of my children's needs. That's my excuse, yet none of them really needed me all that much. My firstborn and my baby both tried to shed me like a husk from the start, and the twins came with a fine interior sight from which they could simply look past me at everything more interesting. And my husband, why, hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher. I married a man who could never love me, probably. It would have trespassed on his devotion to all mankind. I remained his wife because it was the one thing I was able to do each day. My daughters would say: You see, Mother, you had no life of your own.
They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.

Why do I love this book so much? Ms. Kingsolver's descriptions are vivid. Despite not having been able to visit Zaire (as it was known while she was writing the novel) because of her outspokenness about the dictator, Mobutu, she drew upon her memories of a year spent in the Congo as a child, and her obviously extensive research.

Congo sprawls on the middle of the world. Sun rises, sun sets, six o'clock exactly. Everything that comes of morning undoes itself before nightfall: rooster walks back into the forest, fires die down, birds coo-coo-coo, sun sinks away, sky bleeds, passes out, goes dark, nothing exists. Ashes to ashes.
Kilanga village runs along the Kwilu River as a long row of little mud houses set after-one-the-other beside a lone red snake of dirt road. Rising up all round us, trees and bamboo. Leah and I as babies had a long, hodgepodge string of unmatched beads for dress-up which would break when we fought over it and fly into a snaking line of odds and ends in the dirt. That is how Kilanga looked from the airplane. Every red mud house squats in the middle of its red dirt yard, for the ground in the village is cleared hairless as a brick. The better to spy and kill our friends the snakes when they come calling, we are told. So Kilango is a long low snake break clearing. In a long row the dirt huts all kneel facing east, as if praying for the staved-off collapse--not toward Mecca exactly but east toward the village's one road and the river and behind all that, the pink sunrise surprise.

Her characters, although they sometimes (I'm looking at you, Rachel) verge on caricatures, come to life on the page, as they struggle and grow, like the seeds they brought with them: Kentucky Wonder beans and pumpkins, which grew giant leaves but never bore fruit. I've seen many readers complain that the novel goes on too long, following the sisters for decades after what most consider the climax of the novel, but for me, these later years are some of the most interesting. Seeing how they turned out, how their lives were forever changed, is the beating heart of the story. (Even you, Rachel.)

I first read this novel in the early 2000s, when I read a lot of Oprah's recommendations as a young English teacher in my 20s. My reading tastes and standards have changed a lot over the intervening years, but this one is still special to me. It's probably been ten years since I last read it, having somehow misplaced my copy, receiving one -- maybe the same one? -- from one of my book club ladies, then finally packing it along to Hawai'i. Each time I reread it, my perspective is a little different, and I'm sure I'll get something different out of it when I reread again in another decade. ( )

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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. ( )