Poisonwood Bible

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This month's book for the book club  was The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.  For those of you not familiar with the book, here's a summary taken straight from Kingsolver's official website.

"The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the self-centered, teenaged Rachel; shrewd adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility."

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It took a little bit to get into the book and get a feel for where it was going, but about a quarter of the way through this book I got sucked in.  I loved seeing present Congo through the eyes of each of the daughters while getting a past perspective from the mother.  The imagery was amazing.  I felt like I was in Africa while reading this book.  Even though the characters are fictional I really felt like they were real.  There was a lot of fun foreshadowing that still somehow managed to take me by surprise.  

The story of the family was fascinating, but I was very interested in the "historical" aspects of the book.  I was disturbed by how much of a role the United States had in furthering the misery of Congo and later, Angola's people, and I've been thinking a lot about our foreign policy because of it. 

I started to get a little impatient at the end, because each section would skip ahead a decade at a time, so it was a little hard getting your bearings for how old all of the characters were at any given section.  I felt as though the section after the family's departure from the village should have been its own book. 

Over all, if you have any interest in Africa you will probably really love this book.  It was a very good book, and I'm glad that I took the time to read it.