They face famine, flood, ant invasions, and social rejection as their lives unravel. As the situation in Congo deteriorates (the horrific Belgian colonial government yielding to a democratically elected Patrice Lumumba who is assassinated with help of the CIA and replaced by the corrupt and violent Mobutu), the family disintegrates.
The daughters are all quite different: Rachel, the older beauty, who is in denial of the inadequacy of her moral code and social aspirations among the vines, spiders, and mud Lea and Adah, the twins, both brilliant in their own ways but Lea being skeptical and healthy whereas Adah is physically impaired and willingly mute and the baby Ruth-May who is the first one to make a social bond with the kids of the village. The Price family - a rigid, fundamentalist preacher, his wife, and their four daughters - arrive from Bethlehem, GA in a village in Congo and are faced with the emptiness of their beliefs against the fullness of the life of the Congolese around them. This was a fantastic read full of poetry and beautiful prose about the crumbling of a Christian missionary family in the Congo in the late 50's/early 60s.
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