When a book absorbs my attention and occupies my every idle thought, I binge. I nearly slapped it from my Mother in Law’s hand when she pulled it from her book shelf for the simple fact that I saw the word “Bible” plastered across the front of it, but then I saw the name, Barbara Kingsolver, and my prejudice softened… slightly. I decided to give it my “first line test”. I caught an obsession for first lines from one of my female professors which I’ve never been able to shake. It read, “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened”. That’s pretty damn good. My intrigue grew with each sentence my eyes rolled over and before the final punctuation of the first chapter, I had both laughed and cried, twice. Her prose made me want to dig deep into my own soul and bear a book so worthy of conception.

~Joy