What readers think of The Poisonwood Bible, plus links to write your own review.

VEry interesting writing style with four distinct points-of-view, but the ending to the book dragged a bit too much. I enjoyed the way Rachel developed in a twisted way.

This book was highly recommended; yet I am struggling like mad to get through it. I am not impressed. You have to really like slow books to like this one.

I picked this book up after reading reviews on cover. It started well but lost its way about half way through. Kingsolver has done a beautiful job of describing the country and the character development of the daughters was great, but the male characters (Nathan price & Anatole especially) were single dimensional and shallow.

The reaction of Ruth-mays death from Nathan was feeble and Anatole's prison experience wasn't even mentioned. Rachael's character just plain annoyed me and I felt it would have been more poetic if she had ended up destitute. Overall quite confusing with place and timing details towards the end. I didn't know at one stage how Leah got to America, very confusing. Less pages and more male character development would have made this a much better book sorry. Disappointed.

Though Kingsolver's style of writing is on its own intriguing this book just. . . didn't do it for me. It had a large number of important points and showed many different sides of the same issue through all the different points of view but it simply could not keep my interest. There were so many unnecessary things added into the plot that sometimes I skipped whole pages just to move on to something that was worthwhile. Not to mention that the characters themselves annoyed me to no end. All they did was piss and moan. They are so self-centered it was hard for me to feel any sort of connection to them. There were some moving moments but in the long run this novel should have ended up being half the length it turned out to be. It just kept dragging on and on. I definitely would not recommend this one for pleasure reading.

I found this book to be beautifully written, and I feel that I learned much about life in the Congo of the late 1950's. However, I feel Barbara Kingsolver (like John Steinbeck) write with the purpose of if it can go wrong, it will. A book that is so long should not be totally depressing...and this one was.

The Poisonwood Bible is well written, with underlying moral themes, but in parts the story sags and becomes less than entertaining.

i found it to be a rather simplistic attempt at a possibly greater story

Although I am only in tenth grade I felt this was a good book to read, but definitely not one to disect. It lacks stong themes and was not too deep. The story was just there, nothing really to discuss, I believe that this book was over rated generally, although Kingsolver is a wonderful writer it does not compare to Nathaniel Hawthorne lieterature. But overall a good book to read in your spare time. Not to assign to teenagers.Jackie