Leah Price Quotes

The "foreign visitors" Leah mentions are likely other white people who are unaccustomed to the ways of life in the Congo. The Congolese aren't trying to take advantage of other people; they're merely trying to survive.

Um, we take from this that Leah has never been walking through NYC in the middle of August. Once again, the sense of smell conjures up powerful memories of Africa. Or, in this case, its absence is representative of America, a country which, to Leah, seems to have been dunked in hand sanitizer and left out to dry.

Here's Leah a couple decades later. Now, she doesn't only believe that the world is unfair, she's believes there's a complete lack of justice in the world. Is she being realistic or pessimistic?

If you don't have our Bible guide open side-by-side with this one, you'll want to check out Simon Peter, or Saint Peter, here. In one of his not-quite-finest moments, Simon Peter denies knowing Jesus after Jesus gets captured and hauled off to be crucified, and Leah similarly believes she has, once again, denied her sister Adah.

This interaction helps Leah transition from believing that God has the good of mankind at heart, to blaming Him for all the world's troubles, to maybe not believing in Him at all. Talk about a character arc.

Even though Ruth May was probably insensible at this point after her snake bite, Leah still blames herself for making Ruth May's last seconds less than serene.

Even though Leah's practically in another country when Pascal is murdered by rival soldiers, she finds a way to take responsibility for his death. Now that's an overdeveloped sense of guilt.

Talk about a gift that keeps on giving. Nathan is incapable of admitting he's guilty; Leah is incapable of admitting she's not.

Talk about a culture gap. We doubt the Congolese would threaten a child's life to make her behave, because death comes so easily there. Leah, who grew up where a child's death is the exception, doesn't have a problem with it... until Ruth May is on death's door with malaria.

Perhaps Leah's in shock, but she gets over Ruth May's death pretty quickly. Or maybe it's because she's been around so much death in her time in the Congo, she knows it's just a part of life.

Leah observes something that politicians and preachers have in common: charisma. So, what's the difference between politics and religion? To the Kilanga, not much. They think they can vote for Jesus just like they vote for a political leader.

Leah talks about the impossibility of explaining Africa in a letter home. Hey, Barbara Kingsolver had to write an almost-600-page book about the Congo, and she's just scratched the surface! There's a lot more to communication than just translating the words.

As a young teenager, Leah totally buys into her father's idea that women are pretty much worthless if they're not married. With that in mind, her "skills" don't include anything useful like hunting or intelligence. Instead, they include embroidery, which she isn't even very good at.

Leah decides to get married for love. Not because her faith tells her to, but because her heart tells her to. How novel!

Er … has it ever? Mobutu's crimes against the people of Congo are reprehensible. He's the 1% with 99% of the people's money—but the people are so oppressed that they can't even imagine revolting.

Guess what? We have an almost identical idiom: "We don't buy that," as in: "People landing on the moon? Yeah, I so don't buy that." So, what's the relationship between belief and money?

The snake bite is Ruth May's death sentence. No one can read it, because no one knows where it ends … although, according to Kingsolver, it appears to end up in a tree.

Adah shrugs off almost getting devoured by a lion. To her, it's all part of the natural way of life. Who is she to deny a lion a good meal?