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A review by michaeljames122
The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
3.0
2.5 Stars rounded up to 3 because of Danticat's poetic prose
This book is 9 short stories that are (very) loosely linked together. The linkages were not at all linear, which is normally fine, but were also very minimal. For example, you don't really find out how the 2nd and 3rd stories are linked to the 1st story until you finish the 5th story. I feel like I would normally enjoy this kind of puzzle reading, and I almost always enjoy short stories, but it made it very difficult for me to enjoy while listening to the audio version.
Each story is enjoyable on its own, and Edwidge Danticat is a great writer who has a way of 'making sadness beautiful', as one of the characters in the book is described. If you do pick this one up, don't make the mistake I did of trying to connect the dots to the point of not enjoying the stories.
Here's some examples of her writing from this one:
“It was the dread of being wrong, of harming the wrong man, of making the wrong woman a widow and the wrong child an orphan. It was the realization that he would never know why—why one single person had been given the power to destroy his entire life.”
“Strange how people with means can make the less fortunate feel special by putting them to work.”
“I thought exposing a few details of my life would inspire them to do the same and slowly we’d parcel out our sorrows, each walking out with fewer than we’d carried in.”
“Life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people's terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should lose it on your own terms.”
“My mother used to say that we'll all have three deaths: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are out back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.”
“She made sadness beautiful.”
This book is 9 short stories that are (very) loosely linked together. The linkages were not at all linear, which is normally fine, but were also very minimal. For example, you don't really find out how the 2nd and 3rd stories are linked to the 1st story until you finish the 5th story. I feel like I would normally enjoy this kind of puzzle reading, and I almost always enjoy short stories, but it made it very difficult for me to enjoy while listening to the audio version.
Each story is enjoyable on its own, and Edwidge Danticat is a great writer who has a way of 'making sadness beautiful', as one of the characters in the book is described. If you do pick this one up, don't make the mistake I did of trying to connect the dots to the point of not enjoying the stories.
Here's some examples of her writing from this one:
“It was the dread of being wrong, of harming the wrong man, of making the wrong woman a widow and the wrong child an orphan. It was the realization that he would never know why—why one single person had been given the power to destroy his entire life.”
“Strange how people with means can make the less fortunate feel special by putting them to work.”
“I thought exposing a few details of my life would inspire them to do the same and slowly we’d parcel out our sorrows, each walking out with fewer than we’d carried in.”
“Life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people's terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should lose it on your own terms.”
“My mother used to say that we'll all have three deaths: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are out back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.”
“She made sadness beautiful.”