A review by cocoonofbooks
Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

3.0

2.5 stars. I appreciated what Danticat was trying to do with this story. There are a lot of important messages that one could get from this book, about family, forgiveness, love, trauma, and motherhood. Danticat's writing just didn't quite hit the mark. For one thing, I kept getting distracted by the lack of detail about spatial movement and small inconsistencies -- like, Sophie is lying in bed with her eyes tightly shut and tells us that there are tears running down her mother's face. How does she know if she can't see? Someone will be in one place and it's not clear how they got to a different place. It's not terrible, but it's indicative of the overall weak writing of the book.

Most problematically, Danticat deals only at a surface level with the trauma that this plot is steeped in. It's clear that Sophie is traumatized by being "tested" by her mother, but it's not clear exactly what makes it traumatic because it's dealt with very briefly. She blames her mother for the injuries she herself caused, again as a supposed result of being driven crazy by the testing. And later on, she's like, "Oh, BTW, I have bulimia," and there's maybe three references to it later. None of this seems to reach much of a resolution or healing by the end of the book.

It was interesting enough to keep me reading, but I can't say it's worth a recommendation.