SOURCE: “Kingsolver in the Jungle, Catullus and Wolfe at the Door,” in Nation, January 11-18, 1999, pp. 28-30.

In the following review, Leonard offers favorable evaluation of The Poisonwood Bible.

Out of a child's game of Mother May I, looked down upon by a green snake in an alligator-pear tree, Barbara Kingsolver has dreamed a magnificent fiction and a ferocious bill of indictment. The mothers so solicited are white American and black Congolese and matriarchal Africa herself. In their turn, on their knees, keening like birds in a rain of blood, these mothers beseech some principle of naming and knowing, some macrohistorical scale of justice and some mechanism of metamorphosis to console them for their lost children. As in the keyed chords of a Baroque sonata, movements of the personal, the political, the historical and even the biological contrast and correspond. As in a Bach cantata, the choral stanza...