The Poisonwood Bible recap

In 1959, the zealous Baptist preacher Nathan Price brings his wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters, Rachel, the twins Leah and Adah, and little Ruth May, from Georgia to the remote village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo, determined to convert its people. The family is unprepared for the climate, the hunger, the language, and the culture, and Nathan's stubborn arrogance alienates the villagers. As the Congo wins independence and plunges into political turmoil and violence, the mission unravels. Tragedy strikes the family when the youngest daughter, Ruth May, dies from a snakebite, a loss that finally breaks Orleanna's submission to her husband. She flees with her surviving daughters, and Nathan, unrepentant, stays behind and descends into ruin. Told across decades in the alternating voices of the mother and the daughters, the novel follows the women's very different paths through Africa and America as they carry the guilt, grief, and consequences of what their family did in the Congo.

In 1959, an uncompromising Baptist missionary named Nathan Price uproots his family from Georgia and brings them to Kilanga, a small village in the Belgian Congo, to spend a year converting its people. With him are his weary wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters: the vain, homesick eldest, Rachel; the earnest, father-worshipping Leah; her silent, sharp-minded twin, Adah; and the bold youngest child, Ruth May. The family arrives hopelessly ill-prepared for the heat, the food, the illnesses, and the customs of the place, and Nathan's stubborn refusal to understand or respect the villagers quickly sets him at odds with the community and its chief. Narrated in turn by the mother and each of the four daughters, the story opens with the Prices struggling to survive in a world utterly unlike the one they left, as forces far larger than their mission begin to gather around them.

The Price family is destroyed by its mission. After Nathan's rigid refusal to adapt brings hardship and estrangement, and as the newly independent Congo collapses into violence and foreign intrigue, the youngest daughter, Ruth May, is killed by a venomous snake. Her death shatters whatever hold Nathan still had over the family. Orleanna at last walks out of the marriage, leaving Kilanga with her three remaining daughters. Nathan, unable to admit any fault, remains in the Congo and eventually dies there years later, having lost his family and his mind. The surviving women scatter into separate lives and are followed across the following decades: Rachel drifts through marriages and ends up running a hotel in Africa, shallow and unchanged; Leah marries the schoolteacher Anatole and commits herself to life in Africa and to the cause of its people; Adah returns to the United States, is helped medically, and becomes a scientist. Each carries her own burden of grief and guilt over Ruth May and over the family's role in a country wounded by colonialism, seeking, in her own way, some measure of understanding and atonement.