The Dew Breaker The Dew Breaker

The Dew Breaker

    • 3.5 • 35 Ratings
    • $12.99
    • $12.99

Publisher 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.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2004
March 9
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
256
Pages
PUBLISHER
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
1.4
MB

Customer Reviews

archetype67 ,

Beautiful narrative that requires patience

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.

Menala7 ,

Amazing!

Read this for a literature class. This book reveals the pain and story of different people as Haitians...some who fled Haiti for a better life but their memories haunt them, and some remained in Haiti and are also haunted by their past. Because of this book, I’ve become very interested in the history of Haiti, and I’m now taking another literature class where Danticat is our main author.

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More Books by Edwidge Danticat

Claire of the Sea Light Claire of the Sea Light
2013
Breath, Eyes, Memory Breath, Eyes, Memory
2003
The Farming of Bones The Farming of Bones
2003
Everything Inside Everything Inside
2019
Krik? Krak! Krik? Krak!
2004
Brother, I'm Dying Brother, I'm Dying
2007

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