The Poisonwood Bible
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The Poisonwood Bible is a 1998 novel by Barbara Kingsolver, which details a missionary family's life in the Congo beginning in the 1960s as experienced by the five women in the family.
The novel focuses on how the tragedies of violence and hunger experienced by Africans are mostly caused by the foreign influences in the country. Kingsolver expands the novel into more than a historical critique of the colonialization of Africa by creating parallels between the country of the Congo and situation of American women in the last century. Both were controlled and at times exploited by white men without the consent of the dominated. The Poisonwood Bible offers much cause for introspection to any American even slightly interested in the imbalance of power, resources, and justice that exists in the Congo and even the rest of the world.
This unusual book has 5 narrative voices corresponding to the five female members of the Price family.
Early in the book it is revealed that one of the four sisters will die in the Congo, but her identity is not revealed until the event occurs more than halfway through the book. The four daughters react differently to their experience of Congo, a country to which their father has forcibly taken them and their mother in order to do missionary work, despite advice to the contrary, at a time of political unrest. After a series of misfortunes, they eventually decide to leave him on the day , but only after the death of a sister. The four survivors take very different paths into their futures, which are described up to the 1990s.
The book was a selection of Oprah's Book Club in 2000.