If ever you want to pick up a book and just be awed with a book under 300 pages, you may want to read The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat. I love picking random books based on their cover and I love it even more when these books turn out to be good. This was one of those books. I really can't even remember why I decided to pick up this book, but boy I'm glad I did.
A dew breaker was the Creole nickname given to torturers under the regimes of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti. This novel is a collection of 9 short stories that are expertly woven together. The main thread binding these stories being the dew breaker. Throughout the length of the novel Danticat shows you the atrocities that still hunt some of the dew breaker's victims. I think the most surprising thing to me was that Danticat manages to make you fall in love with the dew breaker over the course of the novel (of course he's not really revealed until later, but usually I can detect a plot twist from a mile away). You realize that he's just as tortured as his victims, I mean until the end of the book, when his identity was revealed, I thought he was one of the dew breaker's victims. I will warn you this book will have you at war with yourself. While reading the dew breaker's atrocious acts and the effect it had on people's lives it's easy to become disgusted. But Danticat, being the talented writer she is, will have you ready to forgive the dew breaker in the next breath. If you get a chance, please read it. It really is an amazing book.
A dew breaker was the Creole nickname given to torturers under the regimes of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti. This novel is a collection of 9 short stories that are expertly woven together. The main thread binding these stories being the dew breaker. Throughout the length of the novel Danticat shows you the atrocities that still hunt some of the dew breaker's victims. I think the most surprising thing to me was that Danticat manages to make you fall in love with the dew breaker over the course of the novel (of course he's not really revealed until later, but usually I can detect a plot twist from a mile away). You realize that he's just as tortured as his victims, I mean until the end of the book, when his identity was revealed, I thought he was one of the dew breaker's victims. I will warn you this book will have you at war with yourself. While reading the dew breaker's atrocious acts and the effect it had on people's lives it's easy to become disgusted. But Danticat, being the talented writer she is, will have you ready to forgive the dew breaker in the next breath. If you get a chance, please read it. It really is an amazing book.
Lady T
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