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This collection of interlinked short stories is a quick read, but the characters flitted in and out of my thoughts long after I set down the book. The hardships and tortures faced by these Haitian women across multiple generations seem almost unbelievable, they are so far from my experience. It is so easy to dismiss a whole country as a place of suffering and not see the people as individuals. Danticat's stories personalize Haiti and remind you that these horrors happen to ordinary people in the wrong place and wrong time. I would have liked a clearer picture of how some of the characters were related but that says more about me than it does about the writer, who was hailed as a young genius 15 years ago and I can see why. She shifts from allegory to straight-out narrative to an almost stream-of-conscious style and seems to find the right tone for each of her tales. I will never look at a newspaper article about Haiti the same way, and I think that is what the author intended.