SOURCE: “The Mark of Africa,” in World and I, Vol. 14, No. 4, April, 1999, p. 254.

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

When novelist Barbara Kingsolver was asked by a reader whether her fiction is based on her own life, she replied that her narratives are not drawn directly from her immediate experience; rather, they emerge from her struggle to give literary form to ideas. As she explained,

I devise a very big question whose answer I believe will be amazing, and maybe shift the world a little bit on its axis. Then I figure out how to create a world in which that question can be asked, and answered. … I populate my setting with characters who'll act out my theme, scratching their heads in wonderment all along the way until their interactions with the world and each other have finally caused them to cry...