Rating: 
Summary: Meh...
Review: Maybe it's because I'm a Senior in high school who was forced to read this over the summer, but I really despise this book. I give it 2 stars because it is obviously well-written, but it is just one big incessant ramble. I thought it would never end; thank God I was wrong. The book is a composition of "journal entries," although the characters never really wrote in journals. One of the characters is a little girl who writes her chapters at the college level. The main flaw with this book is that the characters are completely unlikeable. One daughter is a vain superficial jerk (and I liked her the best out of all of them, which is not saying much), the other is a pretentious snob, the other is mentally handicapped and annoyingly writes a lot of things backwards, and the 4th daughter is a little girl who seems to have terrible luck. The mother is submissive to the father and shrouds herself in self-pity, and the father is a preacher who does nothing BUT preach.I understand why women would like this book (...), but if you are a red-blooded male who enjoys car chases, explosions, and the occassional romantic comedy (who didn't love You've Got Mail!), do not subject yourself to the torture of reading this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Stunning, wild, hungry... Kingsolver is a wonder
Review: The author of the magnificent books, 'The Bean Trees', and 'Pigs in Heaven', leaves her protagonists Turtle and her mother in the Southwest and puts us in Africa, the Congo, Kilanga, in 1959. This stunning book is the tale of the family (of girls) of a Baptist preacher who moves them to a Congolese village to convert the heathens. The story is told through the voices of the girls: Rachel, Leah, Ruth May, Adah, Rebecca, and their mother, Orleanna Price. Their father's ignorance and somewhat violent tendencies, the sheer poverty and simpleness of the village, and the vast differences in their lives for these girls from Georgia are expressed by all of them. Their personalities, their strengths, their needs and their confusion are evident by their every word and their complex thoughts. Kingsolver, who is a brilliant writer anyway, brings a fascinating perspective to her imaginary family in the Poisonwood Bible - as she, the daughter of public health care workers who spent time in the Congo when she was very young, "waited thirty years for the wisdom and maturity to write this book." A powerful story, an excellent read.
Rating:
Summary: The true african failure: parenting by the Price family
Review: The Congo is brutal and merciless. It will eat you alive-or destroy your family as it did to the Price family in The Poisonwood Bible. Nathan and Orleanna Price leave for the Belgian Congo in 1959 as Baptist missionaries-carrying their way of life on their backs. A remote village deep in the jungle became the Price family's new home, and is no place to raise a young family used to American culture.
Barbara Kingsolver wrote the novel through the voice of the four young Price girls, who are trying to please their overbearing father and quiet mother. Kingsolver masterfully differentiates the four girls' voices and after initial confusion as to who the girls were, it worked well in the end. The task of authoring a novel from four distinct perspectives is a technical undertaking that Kingsolver delivered on a silver platter. She incorporated beautiful lyrical prose through the voice of her poet child, Adah, who can't communicate orally but remains a bona fide genius her entire life.
The novel's main theme evolves from Orleanna. This docile but caring mother supported her husband through the daring decision to move to Africa-but couldn't stand up to the Mr. Darling-type familial dictator when the Belgian Congo became obviously too dangerous for the family. Orleanna needed to make sacrifices, stand up and protect her children while the window for survival still was open. After the revolution, the Price family had no chance. The four daughters escaped Africa through being carried, buried, ferried and married: desperate options for a desperate mother. The point that Kingsolver made is that parents, especially mothers must have the courage to do what is the best for the children, not for themselves. Selfishness breeds children's destruction; sacrifice springs enrichment. Orleanna and Nathan Price were primarily selfish characters. When Orleanna escaped Nathan and Africa, she didn't have the needs and lives of her children before her own well-being. When she started walking away from Kilanga, she didn't even gather her children behind her and take them along. She simply walked and her three surviving kids followed by their own desire. She made no real effort to help them escape Africa, and only one did. Her and Nathan's selfishness destroyed their family.
Kingsolver's biases are evident in the plot and characters of The Poisonwood Bible. She wears her politics on her shirtsleeve, and it interferes with the progression of the novel. Because she turns Leah into her mouthpiece, she feels necessary to extend the book 150 pages past what it should have been so Leah could evidence all of the evils that the American government committed in the Congo. The reader must remember that Barbara is no historian, but a novelist-writing fiction, not fact. Although the stage of the Congolese revolution was perfect for the novel, it ultimately distracted the familial theme of providing an emotional nest of comfort for one's offspring.
Nathan Price is much too one-dimensional. Kingsolver makes no effort to develop him any more than a ruthless, overbearing father who is planning and living his own penitence at the expense of his children. His motivations and his internal struggle, unlike Orleanna, are anything but transparent. On that note, it seems that any novel these days that involves Christian missionaries is also one-sided. Kingsolver makes too many expositions that Christian proselytizing is trivial in non-Christian cultures. As a two-year foreign Christian missionary in impoverished and impecunious locations, I thought that Kingsolver's personal anti-proselyte bias bled through the pages. If that was an intended theme of the book, she did it by telling only one side of the story by not developing Nathan.
Rating:
Summary: I Would Definitly Recomend
Review: The Poisonwood Bible set in the Belgian Congo during the 1960's, releases the story of a missionary family and their journey to Africa. The Poisonwood Bible is a historical based novel, where much happens politically in just a small amount of time. Within five hundred pages of mostly fiction plot isn't the main focus of the novel. The story is made of mostly thoughts and reflection, and some of this could have been replaced with more action and adventure for some extra balance to the overall tale.
Kingsolver seems to make a huge effort to drive this book by its characters. The characters seem so real, because the reader can see inside the protagonist's heads. Kingsolver allows five women, four being only children for a majority of the book, to release such strong views, beliefs and emotions. Within the family of characters, each person was given such a different personality; this was key to get the broadest sense of the story possible.
The language is consistent through out the entire novel. I wouldn't say it was an easy book to read, but I wasn't sitting next to a dictionary looking up three words per page. The content of the book is what was more difficult to undertake. Depending on what stage of life the reader is in could change the book entirely. Kingsolver makes it easy for the reader to relate to book by incorporating 'every human' thoughts into the characters thoughts.
The beautiful and unique style of The Poisonwood Bible is what kept me turning the pages in a smooth rhythm for so long. The images and writing techniques used in Kingsolver writing of this book, is what made it seem so real. After finishing this book it was hard to believe it was a work of fiction. Detailed descriptions and portrayal of the big picture are two aspects of writing Kingsolver managed to use and put together to keep the equilibrium of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Life and murder in South Africa, not the Bible.
Review: This is a remarkably complex account of a missionary who spent thirty years ministering to 'the least of these' in postcolonial South Africa at the expense of his family. Coming from Bethlehem, GA., with the Southern naivete, to the jungles of what was called the Congo (now Zaire) where there were no Piggly Wiggly sores, they are hardly prepared for the political upheaval taking place.
The writer had lived in Africa as the child of medical and public-health workers. She thought of it as a place of wonders. That is typical childhood memories. She chose an evangelical Baptist preacher to interpret her 'path of exploring the great, shifting terrain between righteousness and what's right.' It took her thirty years to finish the final draft with a little help from her friends.
However, trained as a biologist, her previous books reflect her interest in the natural world. Her collection of essays explore her beliefs that life choices must be ultimately made alone.
With titles like ANIMAL DREAMS, PIGS IN HEAVEN, THE BEAN TREES, they really concern family problems, individual rights, but this one primarily is based on her influence by the Bible (King James Version).
Some of her articles on natural history have appeared in 'Smithsonian' and 'National Geographic' magazines. This ambitious epic into the 1980s was a New York Times Bestseller and one of Oprah's Book Club favorites.
Rating:
Summary: "Tata Jesus is bangala!"
Review: This is certainly the most powerful book written by Barbara Kingsolver. It is an epic novel, a tale of sin and redemption, set against a dramatic political turnover. The backstage is Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the world economic game that plunges this African country into chaos. On the front stage we have a typical 19th century novel, with a familiar plot (see "The Mosquito Coast," "A Play in the Fields of the Lord," or "Kalimantaan"): the theme of white men trying to force his alien culture and religion on native societies, and the disintegration of previous values held by the intruders. The player in this act is a Baptist family, headed by Nathan Price an arrogant, eccentric, religious zealot, obsessed by faith and guilt, who is destined to risk his own life and the lives of those closest to him in pursuit of "saving souls." He represents the patronizing attitude of white colonialists and their devastating legacy. His wife Orleanna is a symbol of passivity, totally dedicated to the care and survival of her kin. The Price family is complemented by four daughters: the oldest, selfish pragmatist 15-years old Rachel, the shrewd twins Leah and Adah, and the youngest, 5-years old, innocent Ruth May. The story begins with the arrival of the Price family in a small village called Kilanga, in 1959. The four girls narrate the story in turn, at the precipice of events, while the mother narrates in retrospect. The narrative turns on different axes, shaped by the 5 feminine characters, the way they contemplate themselves and one another, the surrounding events and their individual adaptation. Congo permeates "The Poisonwood Bible," with descriptive, colorful, imaginative writing the author transports the reader into a world of tropical beauty, of heat and humidity, of abundance and drought. The author herself lived two years in Congo when she was a young girl and her childhood experiences had a lasting effect on her imagination. Although the author places her emphasis on people and not on politics, this a political angry novel, a critical view of imperialistic arrogance, exploitation, and prejudice. Kingsolver, a radicalist by nature, writes with strong idealistic messages, she deliberately hooks people into a good story and then gives a political lesson. Why the title "The Poisonwood Bible?" Nathan Price, the obsessed missionary shouts "Tata Jesus is bangala!" but it never occurs to him that in Kigongo (the language spoken in Kilanga) meaning depends on intonation, and while "bangala" may mean "precious and dear," it can also mean poisonwood tree, a virulent local plant!.
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