Beautifully written - if rather lengthy - story that somehow feels shorter than it actually is. Perhaps because the voices are for the most part so convincing, or perhaps because the pacing is so finely judged, I don't know - but I've been hesitant to read this because it's 600 odd pages (a lifetime of reading fantasy has successfully turned me off the literary brick) and yet I'm so glad I finally did. Initially, I thought not giving the same attention to Nathan as to his wife and daughters was a mistake, because he can come off as a caricature at first glance, but it became unfortunately clear from the narrative that calling him a caricature is wishful thinking at best. Plenty of colonised communities must have suffered from any number of iterations of that grotesquely blinkered man; Kingsolver made the right choice by not highlighting his sort any further. The effects of his presence are horrible enough.

What I'm less convinced of is the tone of the second half of the book. The first half is I think the best - the failing mission seen through the eyes of the missionary's children - but once those children have escaped and grown up (the two events are nearly interchangeable) there's a slight whiff of soapbox creeping into the story. And I'm sympathetic to that perspective, but I was sympathetic to it before all this adult separation into illuminating types and I think something of the dense and vivid subtext of the first half is lost in the plain obviousness of the second. Even so it's an excellent and thought-provoking read.