Over the last ten or so years since The Poisonwood Bible was written I reckon it has been the book that, more than any other, has completed the sentence 'have you read..." when that sentence has been directed towards me. Most recently a friend who grew up as a Jehovahs Witness said that if I wanted to know about her childhood growing up in a devout Christian family I should just read The Poisonwood Bible. And convnianlty it was on my bookshelf. So I read it.
First off, If you want to find out about just a few of the ways in which Europe (in this case, Belgium) and The United States have totally fucked up Africa by either (a) completely misunderstanding it or (b) acting out of the most gratuitous self interest, then this is the book for you. Some of it you might already know and some might come as a large shock, but to paraphrase (and somewhat redirect) my favourite line in the book "Africa, you don't have to like it but you sure as hell have to admit that its out there".
On a human level, it is a story of a family who end up in the wrong place, at the wrong time, for all the wrong reasons and consequetly have their notions regarding life, the universe and everything turned on their heads. This book is a great portayal of just how fragile the average human life is to the preasures and changes that it must encounter along the way - pressures that originate in those closest to us as well as places in time and space so distant that they are almost unknowable. In the end, free-will might simply come down to our ability to make the best of an utterly uncontrolable situation.
Spoiler alert - don't read on if you don't want to.
My only critisism of the book, if it is really a criticism, is that from the point that the family breaks up after Ruth May's death, the story of each family member could have been a novel on its own rather then the abbreviated histories that are given. But that could be a bit too much to ask.
There is a great interview with Barbara Kingsolver on the BBC World Bookclub about this book. You can access it for free at the iTunes store or at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003jhsk/episodes/player. As far as I remember, they touch on the idea of how each family member could have had their own story in the interview.
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