The novel opens with a clear image: “a ruin so strange it must never have happened”, the remaining of a once thriving forest (Kingsolver 5). It is a saddening thought: a forest, the symbol of growth and happiness, being reduced to ruins, the symbol of chaos and despair. These sentences suggest that something terrible will happen along the course of the narration, and what was once a beautiful forest will turn into a desert, a ruin. Orleanna talks to her lost child, she feels responsible for this loss. She feels as though she should have done more to protect her, to be there for her, to prevent the accident. She refers to a great disaster throughout her narration: the death of that child. This particularity of this novel is that it has five different narrators: Orleans and her four daughters. While the girls tell their story in the present tense, their mother talks in the past. She is at the present time, recounting …show more content…
Rachel is a teenager who cares about mundane things and acts like she is royalty. Despite being twins, Adah and Leah are very different; Adah does not care much about material things and prefers to quietly observe everything and everyone; Leah is the complete opposite of Rachel. She likes being outside, climbing trees and helping her father. Finally, there is Ruth May, the youngest daughter, she is carefree and just wants to play; despite being different, she quickly bounded with the African children. Adah has the most compelling voice for me, she is aware of her disability and yet, she does not let it stop her. She is very strong-minded but she still keeps her thoughts to herself. Although she lacks confidence and has a poor opinion of herself, she is really gifted and is perhaps the smartest one among the four. She truly thinks things through and it is obvious that she asks herself lot of questions. It does not bother her that the Africans were different because she thinks of them as