I put off reading this book for the longest time. Almost everyone I knew had read it and raved about it. I’m really cynical about popular books as they rarely live up to expectations but this one did. It felt like a more tragic Little Women written for a modern audience. The only complaint I can express is that I felt like the character of Nathial was a little one demensional and overdone.

Four young girls accompany their missionary father and their mother to a Congolese village, and none of them manages to truly leave Africa again, although each reacts to the place in a completely different way, with a completely different outcome. I would not call this story, in which the naive family survives famine, drought, malaria, crocodiles and ant infestations, particularly uplifting. In fact, it is a downright depressing examination of the problems of Africa compounded by Westerners’ attempts to bring our god and our ways into a completely alien culture.

I thought this book was fantastic! It really opens your eyes and puts you in another world. A bit slow at first, but definately worth it in the end

I didn’t enjoy this book, but that may have been because I listened to it as an audiobook. I had a really hard time telling the different characters apart and, as a result, couldn’t bring myself to care about them. Otherwise, the story itself was interesting.

This is amazing, just plain amazing. Definitely the best book I’ve read in quite some time.

This took me almost 3 months to complete, but it was worth it!

I am not sure if this book was better the first time because it was new to me then, because I read it rather than listened to it, or because of where I was at in life then versus now. But regardless of any of that, it’s still worth reading.

This book brought back some childhood memories of sitting in church basements watching slides the missionaries would bring in of their time in the mission fields. These were always strange, somewhat detached folks in clothing that wasn’t quite mainstream with unusual languages rolling off their tongue trying to breathe life into their stories and make them real to those of us sitting in folding chairs, wearing our Sunday clothes, and distracted by the smell of coffee brewing.

I left the rigors of the church years ago, and reveled in the disenchantment the characters experienced as their well intentioned father came unglued while rying to force 500 years of change on people who didn’t give a flying frog fart about his god or his rules. It’s a glorious story.