"The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver. HarperFlamingo, 1998
Rev. Price, his wife and four daughters fly to the Congo in the late 1950s and take over an abandoned mission. The experience of trying to come to grips with the reality of life in Africa is related in turn by each member of the family, including the 5 year old and a brain-damaged teen twin. Against the background of Congo's struggle for independence, we see how the individual views of events and ways of coping provide us with a complex and very rich composite picture of the personal, political, and economic issues of the time and place.