The Poisonwood Bible KINDLE MOBI by Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible is the story of an American Southern Baptist family's move to the Congo under their overbearing Christian father's desire to spread his faith to a culture he does not understand and has no interest in learning about. Barbara Kingsolver's articulation of the nuances of experience, the profoundly different narrative voices she assumes like an experienced character actress, and the way she fluently plays with language, show Kingsolver's love and mastery of her craft.

The novel begins in 1960 , and covers the period of independence and revolution in the Congo. To the father, American Christian ways are the correct ones even though the people he attempts to convert have long survived in an environment and culture for thousands of years which they have melded and adapted to as completely suited to their survival. The wife and four daughters he bullies into coming are merely items he exports, with no education about the life they will live or any understanding of how they will fare in a place so different from what they know. They bring packages of cake mix and warm coats as they have little knowledge of where they are going. No matter what, though, the father, Mr. Price, believes in his "white" superiority to the detriment of both the village people and his own family, and this arrogance leads in part to the death of one of his children. This brings the internal drama of the book to a head. All of the lines of the plot play into the event, making it seem almost inevitable in a sense. Nathan's selfish disregard for his family's safety results in the most innocent family member's death and none of his family can forgive him; the only grief he shows in losing her so young is that she had not yet been baptised! The mother, who was submissive and passive to her husband's demands, finally revolts against him to save her other three daughters.

The civil war after independence further pulls the family in different directions, with one daughter staying and marrying a Congolese man, one who lives in South Africa, and one who returns to the United States.

While I'm not sure Kingsolver says anything completely new about colonialism and post-colonialism, yet since it is told within the context of a family, and for the most part from the perspective of the children it as much a story about the effects of patriarchal control and the stupidity of evangelism in cultures where it has no useful place, as well as the assumption in the West that foreign people needs to be "saved" from themselves, makes the story of this family, caught up a foreign country's daily life and revolution, in which they are both bewildered and out of place, a work of literature that is difficult to put down. (H)