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A review by savaging
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
4.0
I wanted to read this book when I was still in high school. 15 years later I've finally gotten around to it. And what would it have meant to me if I had read it then, this fascination with the mud and the oppressed tied to a conflicted maltheism? Would I have been able to stomach it?
There are flaws in the book. The narrative structure doesn't always work: we're expected to believe self-obsessed Rachel can somehow record verbatim difficult geopolitical debates. Also Kingsolver wrote a terrible last sentence. "Walk forward into the light." I wanted to cross it out of the library copy, as a benefit to other readers.
But there was much more that I loved, and anyway the character of Adah alone can cover a multitude of sins. The little demon-imp of a girl writing:
"Yet we sang in church 'Tata Nzolo'! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandary. I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite figure the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which Tata Nzolo is home at the moment."
There are flaws in the book. The narrative structure doesn't always work: we're expected to believe self-obsessed Rachel can somehow record verbatim difficult geopolitical debates. Also Kingsolver wrote a terrible last sentence. "Walk forward into the light." I wanted to cross it out of the library copy, as a benefit to other readers.
But there was much more that I loved, and anyway the character of Adah alone can cover a multitude of sins. The little demon-imp of a girl writing:
"Yet we sang in church 'Tata Nzolo'! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandary. I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite figure the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which Tata Nzolo is home at the moment."