The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver 1998

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
family literary fiction historical political injustice

Our Take

A missionary drags his family into the Congo and the Congo wins. Kingsolver gives each Price woman her own voice and watches the patriarch's certainty corrode everything it touches. The loss of Ruth May is the moment the novel becomes something else entirely — and what it becomes is reckoning.

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