There’s a quote from Wade Davis in the Author’s Note - “Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you” – that I think can be read both as a judgment on the so-called “martyrs” of Operation Auca, but also as a warning to the reader, not to judge these people by the standards of the present day. And the novel’s saving grace (irony intended) is how the missonaries’ evangelical certainties are questioned in the second generation and outright rejected in the third.

Her research seems very solid of course, but more than that, her very fine intelligence, her attunement to the spirit of the times, and most importantly, her open-mindedness somehow make it all work. Five Wives, by Joan Thomas, is based on a true story of five missionary families in Ecuador in the 1950s. What a magic trick Thomas pulls off here! She takes the true story of five American missionary families in the 50s – people who embody to me colonial arrogance, cultural insensitivity and misguided self-righteousness – and somehow makes them interesting and complex, even sympathetic. Its a book about five missionary wives whose. With only five minutes left in the show, they decide to use the remaining. Joan Thomas is a Canadian author whose current book, Five Wives, won nearly every honor in her home country. I didn’t love it, I didn’t enjoy it, but I certainly admired it. It tells the stories of the six wives of Henry VIII, as they compete to decide. I hardly know what to say about Five Wives.

Five wives by joan thomas