Next books for mowing!
So this book feels almost like an accidental sequel to my previous book, Bernice L McFadden’s Gathering of Waters. This book takes place in Haiti, where we meet a fisherman and his young daughter. We begin with this fisherman trying to give her to a local fabricstore owner. And we learn soon enough that he’s in deep despair and mourning for the death of her mother, who died when Claire was born. The fabric store owner was there when the mother died and nursed the new born child from her own breast.
We move from here to the wider town, meeting the husband of the fabric store owner, who is killed after a radio broadcast exposed the vulnerabilities of local gangs now infesting the town. We also meet a would be radio writer, a school superintendent whose son rapes and abandons a young girl working for the family, and a whole host of other characters.
This novel spends a lot of time trying to create the broader context for a character we meet in the time of crisis, and we realize and learn there’s so much more going on.
I found this book to have a very strange analog novel that I felt compared interestingly to this. Oddly, I found this book to be a lot like Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the ways in which the stories of the central figures opened up the novel to the other figures connected to this story. It’s a rough comparison, but I couldn’t shake it as I read more and more.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Claire-Sea-Light-Edwidge-Danticat/dp/030727179X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=claire+of+the+sea+light&qid=1555873643&s=gateway&sr=8-1)