Customer Reviews

Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries)

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This is a neat book! It starts out with a chapter about Barbara Kingsolver, quite chatty and very interesting. And then there is a much longer chapter about the Poisonwood Bible, which is one of my favourites. This chapter is quite deep and occasionally too 'academic', but most of it is clear and it has made me think about the book. I'm now reading the novel again, and I'm enjoying it even more. The book finishes with three short chapters about how people liked the novel when it came out, and about how it did so well. All of which is interesting in its own way, too. I'm going to read more of Kingsolver's novels now.

If you enjoy thinking about books, and seeing things that you didn't really know were there, and if you loved the Poisonwood Bible, I can recommend this book. The author did a good job!

Wagner-Martin's guide to The Poisonwood Bible was a disappointment. I had read the novel and I bought Wagner-Martin's book hoping to catch points that I had missed and get a better understanding of the book. Wagner-Martin did bring out some parts of the novel that I had missed and for that I am grateful. But she also got some parts of the book absolutely wrong. Most importantly, she mis-identified the village witch doctor and the person who put a snake in the chicken house which killed the youngest daughter. The fact Wagner-Martin gets confused over the plot seriously undermines her ability to guide any reader through an absolutely wonderful novel.

This contains a few errors here and there although nothing big. It's worth maybe $6 or $8, not the $10 I paid for it. This is reasonably useful if you're writing a paper on the book and are the type to get lost in the story and miss some of the larger picture. Otherwise, not really.

This book is much different from previous Kingsolver books such as The Bean Trees. However, it is enjoyable and more inventive. The use of different voices is surprisingly easy to follow and gives the story multiple perspectives. The first part of the book is slow, painful, and a bit dogmatic. The father's character is so over the top, he is hard to take. But HANG ON, the second half picks up and the characters become more real.