Word: poisonwood
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Barbara Kingsolver's reputation achieved something like critical (and commercial) mass with "The Poisonwood Bible" (1998). Her three earlier novels, "The Bean Trees" (1988), "Animal Dreams" (1990) and "Pigs in Heaven" (1993), built a considerable readership, particularly among women, as offbeat, eco-feminist romances, and Kingsolver could have gone on repeating the elements that made those books popular: independent females vaguely adrift in the U.S. Southwest with strong views on such matters as honoring Native American rights and sheltering Latin American political refugees. But she extended her range dramatically in "Poisonwood," a long, incantatory meditation, filtered through the memories...
...With "Poisonwood" still riding near the top of paperback charts, thanks at least in part to its June selection by the Oprah Book Club, here comes Kingsolver's new novel, "Prodigal Summer" (HarperCollins; 444 pages; $26), which is something of a return to the author's earlier form. It is an altogether lighter and more easygoing affair than its immediate predecessor. Its setting has narrowed from the vast heart of Africa to a mountain and valley in southern Appalachia over the course of a single hot and unusually rainy summer. Its subject is not the clash of ideologies...
This year's final issue will appear in May, Rosenbaum said. Titles reviewed in upcoming issues of the Book Review will include From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender in Computer Games, edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver...
...insists on river baptisms though crocodiles lurk in the river. Fittingly, though he does not understand this, the Congolese word batiza means both baptism and, pronounced differently, terrify. Worse, "Tata Jesus is bangala," as Price mispronounces it, means not Father Jesus is precious but Father Jesus is a poisonwood tree...
...might be on the point of rebellion. Her novel is both powerful and quite simple. It is also angrier and more direct than her earlier books, Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven, in which social issues involving Native Americans remained mostly in the background. The clear intent of The Poisonwood Bible is to offer Nathan Price's patriarchal troublemaking as an example in miniature of historical white exploitation of black Africa. Kingsolver, 43, lived in the Congo in the early '60s, and fondly remembers the people and the terrain. But this is a novel, not travel writing salted with guilt...