Barbara Kingsolver is my newest favoritest author...
The Poisonwood Bible is the third book I've read by Kingsolver. Animal Dreams and The Bean Trees were also incredible.
Kingsolver can take a basic image--like a tree or a snake (or a moth, thanks to Kirstin for loaning me Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer,which I just started)--and re-create it as if I'm standing right in front of it. The Poisonwood Bible chronicles the life of the Price family, a family of four daughters, a mother, and a crazy evangelical Baptist missionary man. The book follows the lives of these women (and the man, by way of the women's thoughts on him) through their time in the Congo as missionaries. The family is transported from everything they've known in Georgia to a village with...well, with what seems like nothing. In almost every sense of the word this family falls apart. However each character grows to renew her own sense of self and new ideas of family.
I found myself relating to every woman/girl in the book at least a little. I found that sometimes their disturbing thoughts were only disturbing because I could see those thoughts in me. I rooted for a couple of the characters and cried for all of them. There's just no way a review (at least one I write) could do this book justice. It was amazing.
The quote that made it to my journal: "But that exacting, tyrannical God...has left me for good...trust in Creation, which is made fresh daily and doesn't suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun...rises and sets...A caterpillar becomes a butterfly, a bird raises its brood...if these things aren't always what I had in mind, they aren't my punishment either."
Posted by Becky at October 28, 2003 10:33 PM