The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

This book. This book.

You know, I’m not even sure I have this book on my shelves anymore, which would be entirely my doing.

A disclaimer to anyone who first accepts an invitation over to mine for dinner or drinks. If you even mention writing or reading, or anything remotely bookish, I will drag you into my office, which of course I’ve dubbed my “library”, and proceed to go shelf by shelf explaining how I organize by theme, the ones that I have read, the ones in queue to be read, the classics that are a staple to have in any library, the ones I have pretended to read ( the occasional overlap with the previous grouping), and my absolute favorites.

Then more often than not, I’ll grab a choice few, depending on the person, and insist you take them home. Read them, cherish them, noting that returning them is entirely optional.

Because that is how I think books ought to be. Of course, ten percent of my soul screams at me to hoard them as a dragon to treasure. I’m only human. But a book, like a really good one, that can be anything from gut-wrenching to laugh out loud in public so people think you are crazy funny, the ones that stay with you after a year or decade, the ones you find yourself reminiscing about as one would the perfect childhood memory, man, those books are meant to be shared.

I read The Poisonwood Bible in AP English during my junior year of high school. I was sixteen, living in an affluent suburb of Pennsylvania, having traveled little and experienced hardship even less. The story follows the Price girls as they travel to the Congo with their mother and Southern Baptiste Father to convert an African village to the word of God in the political turmoil time period that was the 1960s in a spellbinding and all-encompassing tale.

To state that it was incredibly written feels like the most tragic understatement of all time. For the first time in my life, I paused in awe at a simple turn of phrase. "Sunrise tantalize, evil eyes hypnotize: that is the morning, Congo pink." To my sixteen-year-old self, that sentence was perfection prompting me to jot it down in my flimsy two-dollar notebook for safekeeping. Marking this moment as the first time, I fell in love.

I fell in love with Language.

I re-read the Poisonwood Bible several years back and what struck me about it was how well it adapts to the reader. As a teen and a twin, Leah’s angst and tom-boyishness spoke words that reverberated in my core, and if she was able to find love, maybe I wasn’t as destined for loneliness after all.

As an adult, it was a different sister, Rachel, after begrudgingly forgiving Kingsolver’s misspelling of my name, with her doggedness, and her ability to survive and thrive after making difficult choices and/or mistakes that spent her share of time occupying my thoughts.

I’ll leave out the details for future readers but know that each sister, four in total, and each parent’s story has been woven into a beautiful narrative, not without heartbreak and tragedy, and in some aspects because of this, into a triumph of exploration of the human spirit. Terrible things and amazing things, choices that cannot be unmade unfold into a complex tale that sees its reader to the end.

But, it was not just this novel that changed me. There was another part beckoning the transformation of how I view literature.

It was my AP teacher I have to thank for that. We as a class spent probably close to half the school year on The Poisonwood Bible, and it was my first deep dive into the workings of a novel. Weeks were spent dissecting word choice. How in one paragraph, you’d have four run-on sentences and one short sentence causing that one to stand out. Everything Kingsolver did was deliberate and purposeful. I was blown away by the attention to detail, the seemingly mundane made to sparkle. It awed and it overwhelmed and was exactly what was needed.

Suffice it to say there was a fair bit of hero worship for a long time after. Then again, there still is.

So, to my AP English teacher, Thank you. For teaching me the art and beauty of language.

And, to Barabara Kingsolver, Thank you. For changing my life and unknowingly unearthing passion in young readers the world over. We are forever in your debt.