The Poisonwood Bible in Our Shared Shelf

Mar 07, 2012 melissa rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: grad-school-reading

I will admit to skipping a few chapters because I had such a short time to read this before class. (I'm reading this for my Contemporary Fiction class; not sure I would have picked it up otherwise.) The book is well-written in terms of descriptions and in Kingsolver's ability to convincingly speak through 5 different characters. However, I am still uncomfortable with her portrayal of Congo and Africa in general. I'm not sure she moves very far from how Westerners already view Africa; there are m ...more

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Jan 21, 2008 Brittany rated it really liked it

Shelves: historicalfiction

This was an absorbing book. I suppose if I had to pinpoint one thing I learned from it, it would be "Don't marry a Southern baptist missionary bent on converting all of Africa." Which I'm sure will come in handy.

I worried initially that I wouldn't be able to keep the four daughters straight, but it's amazingly easy to do so, and I think therein lies part of the genius of the book. Kingsolver manages to draw each of the characters so finely that you can pick up the book, open it at a random page ...more

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Apr 03, 2008 Lis rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010-reads

this book is about a missionary family with four daughters in the congo. ultimately i took it as a tale of the blindness and dangers, to ourselves and others, that come when refusing to see beyond what you hold to be indisputably true.

the narrative is from the points of view of all the females in the family, switching each chapter. whenever authors do this it seems very ambitious and so easily gets on my nerves. very few authors can truly change the narrative and create fully developed characte this book is about a missionary family with four daughters in the congo. ultimately i took it as a tale of the blindness and dangers, to ourselves and others, that come when refusing to see beyond what you hold to be indisputably true.

the narrative is from the points of view of all the females in the family, switching each chapter. whenever authors do this it seems very ambitious and so easily gets on my nerves. very few authors can truly change the narrative and create fully developed characters for each. in this case, i think adah suffered most. she was leah's twin born with function of only one side of her brain, dragging one side of her body everywhere she went. trying to take us into her mind and show us how she was actually very intelligent despite not talking, kingsolver would start with poetic lines, frontwards and backwards, etc. etc. it got old quick. also, as a kid i didn't talk. that may seem strange now to all my friends that know me to blurt out all kinds of random things before i think them through, but really, even most family was convinced i was incapable of speaking. because of that experience, i have to say i didn't buy adah coming from a silent spectator's perspective. but anyway, the book as a whole was written well, so moving on.

as you're getting towards the end, it is obvious kingsolver has a political agenda behind the story. if you are part of a group she is portraying unfavorably, you may take offense to it. (missionaries, fathers, americans, etc.) but although you can argue "not everyone is like that", if you've ever lived in another country it is easy to see there is legitimacy to what she's saying. no, not everyone is like that, but some are, and those "some" have often been the loudest, the hardest to ignore, and the reason the reputation of everyone associated with them has at times been tarnished, and this book does show you a point of view, one tale, where you can see how those conclusions can be formed. not everyone thinks the world of us, and we will not change that by just continuing to think the world of ourselves. ...more

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Mar 26, 2010 Lindi rated it really liked it

This was a very hard, but amazing book. I remember passages still all these years later. A fascinating story of obsession and misunderstanding.

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Jul 31, 2008 Joceline Foley rated it it was amazing

Book club pick for the month of July. I have really loved this book for a long time, as well as others by the same author, and we had a great discussion about US involvement in Africa.

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