The book opens the way it closes—with a white woman leading four girls through a jungle path in the Congo.

The mother especially—watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate. . . . The daughters march behind her, four girls compressed in bodies as tight as bowstrings, each one tensed to fire off a woman’s heart on a different path to glory or damnation. (5)

While the story is pure fiction, the world it inhabits is true. The Price family, at the behest of their Baptist Father, relocate to the Belgian Congo on the eve of its 1960 independence. I picked up The Poisonwood Bible to see how Kingsolver would wrestle with the theme of Christianity and Colonialism. I stayed for the characters.

The Poisonwood Bible is a literary masterpiece. Kingsolver employs metaphor in ways that don’t feel obvious or contrived—and then they strike home. Adah’s hemiplegia, her ‘crookedness,’ is a brilliant example. The reader should be satisfied by her apparent ‘cure’ in America, but something’s lost. It’s not until Adah’s final chapter that the full import of this metaphor is realized.

If Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart shows what pre-colonial life was like in Africa (Nigeria, to be specific), Kingsolver’s book is the next page in the historical drama, taking you through the story colonialism and clashing ideologies. At the heart of it all, however, are four girls led in tow by their mother through the jungle.

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. Harper Collins Publishers, 1998.