Adah, however, despises all that her father represents. At the start, Leah adores her father, and strives to aid him in his crucial, onerous work among the villagers.

The middle daughters are twins, Leah and Adah. Conversely, the youngest, Ruth May, at only five, has not yet been imbued with narrow prejudices, and she connects with the village children in ways impossible for the adults. The eldest daughter, Rachel, resents being rent from her carefree American teenage life, and maintains a superior detachment from the black-skinned human beings that inhabit her new world. Orleanna, as wife and mother, quickly realizes that her husband's nearly insane zeal will not protect her daughters from the endemic problems of sickness and hunger. The women of the family, however, have their own individual perspectives, which they lend as the five narrators of the novel. Unyielding in his faith, and blind to the surrounding realities of the Congolese culture, Reverend Price refuses to acknowledge the complete and utter failure of this enterprise.

The patriarch, Nathan, is a silver-tongued tent revival preacher who has dragged his wife and four daughters to this squalid African outpost for the exalted purpose of bringing salvation to the natives. The Price family of Bethlehem, Georgia, arrives in Kilanga, Congo in 1959 as Baptist missionaries. Yet, while working on a larger canvas than in past books, Kingsolver nonetheless draws on her finely honed talents for characterization and observation, to create an intimate portrait of one family's tragic confrontation with the unstoppable forces of nature, history, and hubris. In her novel, The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver extends her formidable literary talents with a large-scale fictional narrative set amidst the political turmoil of post-Colonial Africa.

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