Thoughts pop into your head every minute of every day, and it’s not easy to tell which are your own human (possibly silly or wicked) impulses and which are orders from the Almighty. And they believe that He’ll keep them safe. This particular group of missionaries and their religious community trust God to ‘show’ them or ‘tell’ them what to do.

Their convictions must be strong to continue on through all the painstaking work of fundraising, flying their families to Ecuador, setting them up in unfamiliar settings, and spending weeks/months/years making very little progress. By intruding and disrupting the lives of the indigenous of Ecuador, they believe they are “saving” them from eternal damnation. They believe God is calling them to become missionaries and asking them to help save the souls of His ‘children’. Thomas brings these missionaries and their wives to life their ideas, beliefs, confidence, doubts, strengths, and flaws. Hearing about people who want to bring “savages” to the light by bringing them modern ideas and religion, makes me wonder why some people think they know better.Įxploring the “ actions and motives of the North American intruders” is what Thomas had in mind when she wrote Five Wives. However, happily for me and whoever else might be misled by the synopsis, Joan Thomas has written an incredible story of “ the dark side of belief and the devastating legacy it can leave in its wake”. My expectations going into the novel were not quite met – the description on the fly-leaf implies that there is a survival element to the story: “ about five women left alone in the wilderness” and “ leaving their wives and children to fend for themselves“. You think you have surrendered everything, but there is always something more. Based on true events, Five Wives is a fictional account of the five women whose missionary husbands were killed in the rain forest of Ecuador in 1956.

Five wives joan thomas review