The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat

The Dew Breaker

By Edwidge Danticat

  • Release Date: 2004-03-09
  • Genre: Fiction & Literature
Score: 3.5
3.5
From 35 Ratings
$12.99 On itunes Buy on Amazon

Description

We meet him late in life: a quiet man, a good father and husband, a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a landlord and barber with a terrifying scar across his face. As the book unfolds, moving seamlessly between Haiti in the 1960s and New York City today, we enter the lives of those around him, and learn that he has also kept a vital, dangerous secret. Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant exploration of the “dew breaker”--or torturer--s an unforgettable story of love, remorse, and hope; of personal and political rebellions; and of the compromises we make to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. It firmly establishes her as one of America’s most essential writers.

BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light.

Reviews

  • Beautiful narrative that requires patience

    4
    By archetype67
    4.5 Danticat is a powerful writer who tackles intense topics. The Dew Breaker is no exception. This novel blends and blurs the idea of short stories and novels and succeeds wonderfully. The different POVs move through space and time but stay within the history and culture of Haitians and Haitian Americans and that is part of what unites the chapters. The violent history of Haiti's dictators and the impact they had on generations is explored, as are the ideas of repentance, reconciliation, and what freedom means. This is not an easy book to read, and the people portrayed are complex and flawed. Danticat paints these intensely colored miniature portraits that capture the essence and certain details of the lives she writes about, but we never get the full story. The one flaw was that, whether by nature of the format or because some portraits just gave that tiny bit more that let us empathize or glean a bit of understanding, some fell short of the majority... and those left me wanting that tiny bit more. The flaw is a small one, and the work is intense and horrifying and beautiful.

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