March Meeting - "Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver

March's book is Barbara Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible". As usual, the host will provide drinks and we'll provide the snacks. Happy Reading...

From Library Journal
This intense family drama is set in an Africa on the verge of independence and upheaval. In 1959, evangelical preacher Nathan Price moves his wife and four daughters from Georgia to a village in the Belgian Congo, later Zaire. Their dysfunction and cultural arrogance proves disastrous as the family is nearly destroyed by war, Nathan's tyranny, and Africa itself. Told in the voices of the mother and daughters, the novel spans 30 years as the women seek to understand each other and the continent that tore them apart. Kingsolver has a keen understanding of the inevitable, often violent clashes between white and indigenous cultures, yet she lets the women tell their own stories without being judgmental. An excellent novel that was worth the wait and will win the author new fans.

And a few highlights from reviewers...

"Haunting..A novel of character, a narrative shaped by keen-eyed women." --Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times Book Review

"Kingsolver's powerful new book is actually an old-fashioned 19th-century novel, a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption and the `dark necessity' of history." -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"A powerful new epic..She has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

"There are few ambitious, successful and beautiful novels. Lucky for us, we have one now, in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible..This awed reviewer hardly knows where to begin." -- Smiley, Washington Post Book World