Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I adore Barbara Kingsolver; Poisonwood Bible was one of the great reading experiences of my life. I even read her book about vegetables, and I hate vegetables! Yes, she's always had a political agenda, but in the past, this agenda was complemented by a great sense of story and a sly humor. In this book, both are absent, and you're just left with all the worst parts of her writing: the politics, the tendency to lecture, and the show-offy "I know more than anyone else" kind of aesthetic. Here, she appears to be more concerned with using literary tricks to prove her thesis than she is in telling a story. She says she wanted to write about a loss of identity, so she creates a narrator who is so disconnected from himself that he cannot even acknowledge his own existence in his journal. It plays like a gimmick: "watch me spend 280 pages writing the journal of a character who will never say "I"! It made the story so frustrating to read. She repeats the "lacuna" idea throughout - that the most important part of any story is the part you don't know - but there is no narrative payoff. The "missing part" is easy to guess and not that interesting. Obviously others disagree with me, and I respect that. But for what it's worth, here is one opposing view.