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ecruikshank 's review for:
Krik? Krak!
by Edwidge Danticat
“The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side. What goddesses have joined, let no one cast asunder. With every step you take, there is an army of women watching over you. We are never any farther than the sweat on your brows or the dust on your toes.”
KRIK? KRAK! is a short story collection set primarily in the fictional Haitian village of Ville Rose, as well as Port-au-Prince, New York, and Miami. Danticat is a gifted writer and storyteller, and her sentences are evocative and mystical, almost poetic at times. More than anything, I was swept away by the complex balance of tones of the book: The stories are melancholic and brooding, and they somehow manage to combine a pervasive sense of dread and brutality with a flash of hope. Through these stories, Danticat explores intergenerational trauma and inheritance, the resilience of women, the power and peril of imagination, belonging and identity, and the bonds between mothers and daughters. There are only a handful of specific factual linkages among the stories, but they all flowed so seamlessly—the tonal and thematic coherence really made this feel like a unified collection.
If I have any critique, it is that there is a sameness to the voice of some of Danticat’s protagonists. I struggled to differentiate among the characters, so when a character’s name reappeared later in the book I had a hard time parsing the connection to the earlier story. But I really loved this collection and couldn’t put it down. This was my first Danticat, and it won’t be my last.
I think this book would pair well with Ayiti by Roxane Gay, These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card, and Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta.
KRIK? KRAK! is a short story collection set primarily in the fictional Haitian village of Ville Rose, as well as Port-au-Prince, New York, and Miami. Danticat is a gifted writer and storyteller, and her sentences are evocative and mystical, almost poetic at times. More than anything, I was swept away by the complex balance of tones of the book: The stories are melancholic and brooding, and they somehow manage to combine a pervasive sense of dread and brutality with a flash of hope. Through these stories, Danticat explores intergenerational trauma and inheritance, the resilience of women, the power and peril of imagination, belonging and identity, and the bonds between mothers and daughters. There are only a handful of specific factual linkages among the stories, but they all flowed so seamlessly—the tonal and thematic coherence really made this feel like a unified collection.
If I have any critique, it is that there is a sameness to the voice of some of Danticat’s protagonists. I struggled to differentiate among the characters, so when a character’s name reappeared later in the book I had a hard time parsing the connection to the earlier story. But I really loved this collection and couldn’t put it down. This was my first Danticat, and it won’t be my last.
I think this book would pair well with Ayiti by Roxane Gay, These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card, and Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta.