#barbara kingsolver

What does it cost a child to grow up in a place the rest of the country has already written off? This summary and review isn’t here to sell you on the book’s accolades. It’s here to tell you why this story lands like a punch and lingers like a hymn. Kingsolver, a master of socially conscious fiction, transplants Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield into late-1990s southern Appalachia. What emerges…

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible opens in 1959 with the Price family—mother Orleanna and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May—stepping out of their Georgia lives and into the suffocating humidity of Kilanga, a village deep in the Belgian Congo. Their patriarch, Nathan Price, is a Baptist preacher on a mission to convert souls. But his real gospel is control. The Poisonwood Bible at…

It’s frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets tough you fall back on whatever awful thing you grew up with.