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Dear Haiti, Love Alaine
by Maritza Moulite, Maika Moulite
For me, DEAR HAITI, LOVE ALAINE had two incredibly powerful parts: the first is the relationships between characters. The second is the description of Alaine’s time in Haiti.
Alaine has complex relationships with pretty much everyone. Haha. She’s a bit prickly and probably too smart for her own good, and that makes being close to her a complicated thing. She feels estranged from her mom, and that pain totally comes across in the story. The helplessness she feels and the frustration were heartbreaking.
On a lighter note, I love Alaine’s sense of humor (not going to lie– even the school project gone wrong made me laugh) and her quirky way of relating things. She made the story really fun to read.
The landscape of Haiti is beautifully described, but that isn’t even the whole of it. There’s really something magical in the way the Moulite sisters write about Haiti and what it’s like for Alaine to be there.
I guess the family curse surprised me a little bit in that I didn’t realize until maybe the second half of the book that the curse was going to be such a huge part of the story. It felt like a bit of a hard left turn to me, if that makes sense.
Still, I think the authors tied all the threads of the story together nicely, and stayed away from some of the predictable tropes. I enjoyed reading DEAR HAITI, LOVE ALAINE, and I think readers who enjoy books about narrators making a first visit to a homeland, like THE CAT KING OF HAVANA by Tom Crosshill would enjoy this book.
Alaine has complex relationships with pretty much everyone. Haha. She’s a bit prickly and probably too smart for her own good, and that makes being close to her a complicated thing. She feels estranged from her mom, and that pain totally comes across in the story. The helplessness she feels and the frustration were heartbreaking.
On a lighter note, I love Alaine’s sense of humor (not going to lie– even the school project gone wrong made me laugh) and her quirky way of relating things. She made the story really fun to read.
The landscape of Haiti is beautifully described, but that isn’t even the whole of it. There’s really something magical in the way the Moulite sisters write about Haiti and what it’s like for Alaine to be there.
I guess the family curse surprised me a little bit in that I didn’t realize until maybe the second half of the book that the curse was going to be such a huge part of the story. It felt like a bit of a hard left turn to me, if that makes sense.
Still, I think the authors tied all the threads of the story together nicely, and stayed away from some of the predictable tropes. I enjoyed reading DEAR HAITI, LOVE ALAINE, and I think readers who enjoy books about narrators making a first visit to a homeland, like THE CAT KING OF HAVANA by Tom Crosshill would enjoy this book.