Barbara Kingsolver's "The Lacuna"

This was supposed to be a review of Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Lacuna.” And it is. Sort of.
As I sit here writing this, I am on page 283 of Kingsolver’s latest novel, the 13th work in her distinguished writing career, and by the time you are reading this, I’ll probably be finished.
So far, “The Lacuna” has been everything I want and expect in a good novel and a Barbara Kingsolver novel. It’s filled with rich descriptions that can’t help but paint pictures in my mind and charismatic and captivating characters that keep me turning pages for more while challenging my thoughts and views on the world. Like “The Poisonwood Bible” before it this book has swept me off to a time and place I would have never gone to otherwise allowing me to learn a bit of history along the way.
It is for these reason I am a Kingsolver fan. The first time I read a Barbara Kingsolver novel, I was a senior in high school. The book was “Animal Dreams.” Now, while I love to read and enjoy devouring books to visit worlds I will never see, most of the time I didn’t enjoy reading for school. I didn’t enjoy the pace I was forced to read at, wishing to be able to savor each book’s flavor. However, reading “Animal Dreams” was one of the few reading assignments I enjoyed.
Her use of language to place me out in the Arizona desert, a place I have never been, was like nothing I had read to that point, at least in a novel where the place the author was describing actually existed. After I graduated from high school, I read “The Poisonwood Bible” and knew I had found a new author. The interconnected narration of five characters giving you five different points of view of imperialism in the Congo left me craving more. This is a trait I fear “The Lacuna” will raise in me once again.
Barbara Kingsolver writes what good literature is supposed to be. Not pulp fiction “literature”, but true novels that will stand the test of time. As she stated at one of her book talk , people need fiction for its symbolic properties and its ability to convey emotion. It is the only form of entertainment that allows you to completely set aside your own life with all its troubles and worries and pick up someone else’s. When you do that, you experience my favorite part of reading: You visit entirely new places and often have no idea where you’re about to end up.