May's theme: "The Wildnerness"

May's theme is "The Wilderness", I interpreted this broadly and chose to read "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver.

I LOVED THIS BOOK!

There are many reasons I loved this book. It has subversive feminism, critiques of colonialism, and the struggle for survival.Without giving too many spoilers here is my mini-summary:

The main characters in this book are a Baptist family. This book takes place starting in 1960, and this family in many ways represents stereotypical white families of the South; in this family, Dad is IN CHARGE. He is a Baptist preacher and decides that the whole family, four daughters included, needs to move to The Congo to "save souls". He takes this quite literally from the evangelical perspective, everyone in The Congo that has not accepted Jesus as their personal savior is going straight to hell, thus, he views their mission as imperative and they are doing all the Congolese a favor.

In this book the jungle of The Congo is almost a character in itself because the jungle frequently thwarts the efforts of the people who live there and try to control it and exerts a powerful influence psychologically on everyone there. The forest shapes their behavior and seems to have a will of it's own.

The main events of the book unfold as the family tries to continue their mission even has civil war descends into their village. Everyone in the family copes with this a different way - in contrast to how they started all on the same page.

I very much enjoyed how this book tells the story from each female character's point of view. LOVED THAT.

Now that I have written about this book, I AM READY TO READ IT AGAIN! It was great! I have heard from other friends who didn't care for it as much and there were times I was frustrated with it because I thought the dad was being such a tool it was difficult to read. The colonial issues can be difficult to read as well but I found myself often reflecting on how colonialism promotes the values of the domineering culture but too, how even when reacting to colonialism (our reactions to it) even often promotes the domineering culture's values. For example, you SHOULD be pissed off reading about how Western cultures have taken advantage of many, many, African cultures, YET we DO NOT know what is best for those cultures now. We didn't know then, we don't know now. We can't tell people how to fix the problems - even if we started them - because that is promoting our own values again, not theirs.

Also loved the subversive feminism of this book. I don't think any of these characters would call themselves that but certainly they were. But, don't want to give you any spoilers :)

Summary: READ IT, FIVE out of FIVE STARS!!!!!