Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating - Barbara Kingsolver

Advantages: Totally absorbing
Disadvantages: None

.... A book about life cannot only be about women. So we meet Garnett. Eight years a widower seeking solace in God and mourning his empty bed. Garnett ~ for all the difference in their ages ~ is Eddie’s counterpart. Another mirror. As Eddie shows us Deanna, shows her Deanna, so Garnett does the same for Nannie Rawley, who had been “put on this earth to try his soul and tempt his faith”. It is right then that our third heroine should be the wise elder. Not quite the archetypal trilogy of the maiden, the mother and the crone…but close enough to maintain a pagan balance. Slowly but surely we meet the townsfolk below the mountain and learn their inter-relationships. In this kind of town all relationships are ‘inter’. Folk know more of you than you would have, and less. Over the course of the summer Lusa... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Addictive reading,well written,adictive and thought provoking!
Disadvantages: Opens the mind to the horrors of society!

...I have just reluctantly finished this beautiful book by Barbara Kingsolver. I feel compelled to go out and buy anything she has ever written!! This is a fascinating story about the Reverend Nathan Price who believes himself to have been chosen by God to save the 'pagans' of the Congo region. He arrives with his wife and four daughters and commences his work to convert and spread the word of God. The story is narrated, in turn, by the wife Orleanna and the daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May. It is a sort of nineties 'Little Women'. The daughters are as different in character as they can be which makes for interesting perceptions of their shared experiences. Rachel is the vain and materialistic oldest daughter who misses phonographs and her special shampoo. Leah is striving for recognition from her stern aloof father. Adah... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Vivid prose, well-reserched content, and firmly held views
Disadvantages: Political and religious commentary may offend some readers

...Set alternately in the Congo and the United States during the mid-to-late 20th century, Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible is a stirring indictment of cultural and political imperialism. Speaking with the voices of the five women of the Price family, Kingsolver chronicles the impact of white Europeans on Africa and of Africa on the white men and women who ventured into its largely unknown and misunderstood vastness. Pastor Nathan Price, the not-so-gentle patriarch of the Price family, served Kingsolver well as the arrogant and passionate voice of all those who went to Africa armed with little more than good intentions and ignorance. As a Christian missionary haunted by his own troubled past, Pastor Price sacrificed everything to leave his Georgia congregation and pursue his calling to save the souls of Africa's children... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful