This definitely was a book that left me affected for a long time afterward. The characters were so well developed that even after I was finished with the book, I thought about them in the way that you wonder about people you grew up with or family you haven’t seen in a while. Some other people have criticized the dysfunction portrayed in the book. There is plenty, to be sure, but the book immersed me completely in this foreign place, in the lives of missionaries who I normally would have felt little kinship with, and made me want to know more. Barbara Kingsolver is unquestionably one of my favorite contemporary writers, and this book is so unlike her others. I didn’t expect to like it, but instead I devoured the entire gigantic volume and wished there was more when I was through.

Not since Captain and The Kings have I been this deeply affected about the incidents of a book. The author took deliberate care to assail my senses, made me think and just move me to be more aware of the politics surrounding this country and the world. If you’ve not read Captain and The Kings it’s definitely worth it.

I wasn’t impressed. By the end of the book I was sick of everyone’s dysfunction. Anyone can write about dysfunction. The true challenge would have been to write about a normal family going into the Congo as missionaries and their experiences instead of 500 pages of dysfunction. I will give the author credit for making more interested in African history. And for making me aware that in America, even our poverty is abundant.

This amazingly deep and intense novel gave me an entirely new opinion of Barbara Kingsolver.