Those who rejected Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible because of its length and epic qualities should reconsider. While the novel is, indeed, 546-pages, and not all of the pages are at the same level of intensity and grace, Poisonwood Bible is majestic, containing such plangent passages as, for example, "I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it is frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known."

The plot line is simple: Nathan Price, an authoritarian Baptist minister, takes his wife, Orleanna, and four daughters, Rachel, twins Adah and Leah, and baby, Ruth May, to The Congo to fulfill what he perceives as his destiny to convert — or at least baptize — the "natives." The story is told through the voices of the five women, until the final section of the novel, which is told by an omniscient narrator. While this coda is meant to be a summation, this method is concussive and closes an otherwise-magnificent book in too conclusive a fashion.

Otherwise, the novel is beautifully layered, its language frequently incandescent. Orleanna provides the curtain raiser with a lush description of the Congo in 1959: "Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs, war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping vines. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight." The intertwining of sensuality and spirituality becomes even more amplified as the reader learns that Nathan is terrified of passion —both physical and religious — and abuses his wife by demonizing her into a slut after the conception of their children. As his rage escalates, the imagery associated with Nathan becomes perceptively punitive. Back on Sanderling Island, after her escape from the Congo, Orleanna muses that she grew up seeking neither "ravishment or rescue," as she finally relinquishes her deeply-embedded guilt.

The daughters present fully-realized personae, and viewing their perceptions as they mature is fascinating. Rachel remains the solipsistic queen as the eldest and most materially — although not martially — successful. Her malaprops and self-absorption surface throughout her narrative: "That was poor little me, suddenly a diplomat’s wife on the edge of the forest prime evil, wearing my Dior gown and long black gloves to Embassy parties in Brazzaville, French Congo." She is not lacking in intelligence, only in self-recognition, fearing too much time alone in the dark.

By contrast, Adah, who suffers from hemiplegia, uses the most precise and poetic language in the novel. When the situation becomes unendurable with her antagonistic father, her chapters become more prosaic yet also more philosophical and apocalyptic. After Adah’s rehabilitation, she remarks, "I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom," fully aware of echoing Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire. Rather than in malaprops, like her sister, she writes (she speaks only when necessary and not at all for the first eleven years of her life) in palindromes, the most interesting being "eros, eyesore."

Adah’s twin Leah, remains the perpetual tomboy, even after marriage to Anatole Ngemba, a Congolese man whom she adores. When she conceals herself in a nunnery while Anatole is imprisoned for his political views, she remarks, "I shudder to think what Father would say to me here, skulking among a tribe of papist feminists." When she receives a letter from Anatole, Leah secrets herself in the garden, so she is allowed to "taste him in private." Even defying her father, blasphemously referred to as "Our Father," Leah retains remarkable self-possession.

Ruth May is perhaps the most endearing character in the novel, and therefore her unexpected death rakes the reader’s heart. Leah writes, "I could only stare at Ruth May’s bare left shoulder, where two red puncture wounds stood out like red beads on her flesh. Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above my heart." Kingsolver’s lack of sentimentality is utterly effective. Adah evaluates the situation factually — almost mechanically — but the reader can sense the tears brewing just below her composed surface when she writes that death is "a lightning that cannot strike twice, our lesson learned in the hateful speed of light." The observation is reminiscent of Dylan Thomas’ "After the first death, there is no other."

Curiously, Kingsolver uses only the daughters’ first names initially, then she provides last names as Leah and Rachel marry. In the final narrative chapters, however, each one is referred to by first and last name, which is uniformly Price. If there is a transition, this reader failed to grasp it.

The language largely collapses in the coda with platitudes such as "You can’t teach a thing until you’ve learned it." In this section, we are transported back to the first scene of the novel, but given the cataclysmic changes in each person’s life, we read it far differently. We learn that, presumably, Nathan is dead, having lost both congregation and sanity after his wife and daughters, in his mind, deserted him. The final passage of the novel, again demonstrating the potency of Kingsolver’s style, contains chiseled jewels, with the durability and clarity of diamonds — yet captivating illusions remain.