Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: a hole at the center

With all the fancy stylistic posturing to which Kingsolver resorts to tell this story, she denies a voice to what should be the most interesting of her characters: the father who brought them to Africa. Without any intimate knowledge of him and his motives, we have to take them for granted, which is smug. Are we deprived of him because he's a man (arbitrary) or because of a complete failure of imagination at the heart of the structure?I think this is why the book is much too long and self-indulgently "cute" - Joseph Conrad's tight construction would have been a better model.