The Poisonwood Bible: Book Five

by Barbara Kingsolver
Spanning three decades, this novel tells the story of the Prices, a missionary family that settles in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Book One, Book Two, Book Three, Book Four, Book Five, Books Six-Seven
15 words 176 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. entreaty
    earnest or urgent request
    A mother’s body remembers her babies—the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has its own entreaties to body and soul.
  2. precocity
    intelligence achieved far ahead of normal development
    You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world.
  3. exonerate
    pronounce not guilty of criminal charges
    In our seventeen months in Kilanga, thirty-one children died, including Ruth May. Why not Adah? I can think of no answer that exonerates me.
  4. penitent
    a person who repents for wrongdoing
    As it turns out, though, betrayal can also breed penitents, shrewd minor politicians, and ghosts.
  5. rampant
    occurring or increasing in an unrestrained way
    Nearly all the patients are younger than me. Preventatives for old age are rampant here.
  6. impervious
    not admitting of passage or capable of being affected
    She is very good at it, and impervious to danger.
  7. edict
    a legally binding command or decision
    Elisabet worries genuinely, in spite of our reassurances, that she and Anatole might have been assigned new first names, since theirs are European and “colonialist.” It wouldn’t surprise me, actually. Mobutu’s edicts are that far-reaching.
  8. credence
    the mental attitude that something is believable
    Are they joking? Adah says no one is giving it any credence; here, no one has ever doubted it.
  9. respite
    a pause for relaxation
    We read he’s building himself an actual castle with spires and a moat near Brussels, to provide a respite, I guess, from his villas in Paris and Spain and Italy.
  10. despot
    a cruel and oppressive dictator
    If my sister Rachel and Mr. William Shakespeare put their heads together to invent an extravagant despot, they couldn’t outdo Mobutu.
  11. derelict
    failing in what duty requires
    He came to feel derelict about sleeping at night, for the sake of all the books he’d miss reading in those hours.
  12. absolve
    excuse or free from blame
    I never bothered to notice before how thoroughly I’ve relied on Anatole to justify and absolve me here.
  13. milieu
    the environmental condition
    But Leah always has an answer for everything, with vocabulary words in it, naturally. She said we couldn’t possibly understand what their social milieu was, before the Portuguese came.
  14. egregious
    conspicuously and outrageously bad or reprehensible
    Don’t we have a cheerful, simple morality here in Western Civilization: expect perfection, and revile the missed mark! Adah the Poor Thing, hemiplegious egregious besiege us.
  15. secular
    characteristic of this world rather than the spiritual world
    Their weird library had St. Exupéry but nothing so secular as an atlas of the world, so I had to work from memory.
Created on Thu Mar 29 16:39:56 EDT 2018 (updated Tue Aug 05 15:39:53 EDT 2025)

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