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The Dew Breaker: Summary and book reviews of The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat, plus links to an excerpt from The Dew Breaker and a biography of Edwidge Danticat.
The Dew Breaker
by
Edwidge Danticat
Hardcover: Mar 2004,
256 pages.
Paperback: Mar 2005,
256 pages.
From the universally acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, a brilliant, deeply moving work of fiction that explores the world of a "dew breaker"—a torturer—a man whose brutal crimes in the country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new American reality.
We meet him late in his life. He is a quiet man, a husband and father, a hardworking barber, a kindly landlord to the men who live in a basement apartment in his home. He is a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, recognizable by the terrifying scar on 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: his devoted wife and rebellious daughter; his sometimes unsuspecting, sometimes apprehensive neighbors, tenants, and clients. And we meet some of his victims.
In the book’s powerful denouement, we return to the Haiti of the dew breaker’s past, to his last, desperate act of violence, and to his first encounter with the woman who will offer him a form of redemption—albeit imperfect—that will change him forever. The Dew Breaker is a book of interconnected lives—a book of love, remorse, and hope; of rebellions both personal and political; of the compromises we often make in order to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. Unforgettable, deeply resonant, The Dew Breaker proves once more that in Edwidge Danticat we have a major American writer.
Book Reviews
Publishers Weekly
The slow accumulation of details pinpointing the past's effects on the present makes for powerful reading, however, and Danticat is a crafter of subtle, gorgeous sentences and scenes.
Booklist - Donna Seaman
Starred Review. Danticat's masterful depiction of the emotional and spiritual reverberations of tyranny and displacement reveals the intricate mesh of relationships that defines every life, and the burden of traumatic inheritances the crimes and tragedies that one generation barely survives, the next must reconcile.
Library Journal - Faye A Chadwell
This tour de force will certainly earn Danticat the same high acclaim she gained from her three previous works, which include National Book Award finalist Krik? Krak! Highly recommended.
Kirkus Reviews
Danticat's voice is that of a seasoned veteran, her pages wise and saddened, struggling on the pendulum between regret and forgiveness. Searing fiction with the lived-in feel of the best memoir.
Amazon.com - Regina Marler
Although it is frustrating, sometimes, to let go of one narrative thread to follow another, The Dew Breaker is a beautifully constructed novel that spirals back to the reformed prison guard at the end, while holding unanswered the question of redemption.
Rocky Mountain News - Jenny Shank The Dew Breaker never wavers in placing its attention on individual lives, and as [Danticat] moves from one character to another you feel she is holding their faces up to you . . . [An] accomplished novel.
Associated Press - Jeannette J. Lee
[Danticat’s] prose is at once stately and riveting, echoing sincere grief for Haiti’s plight and capturing the intensity of violent times.
People - Champ Clark
Filled with quiet intensity and elegant, thought-provoking prose . . . An elegiac and powerful novel with a fresh presentation of evil and the healing potential of forgiveness.
The New York Observer - Daniel Asa Rose
With her grace and her imperishable humanity, her devotion to lives lived like ‘a pendulum between forgiveness and regret,’ [Danticat] . . . makes sadness beautiful.
Christian Science Monitor - Ron Charles
The stories relate to one another like beautiful shards of a broken vase . . . Haunting . . . A flawless finale . . . [Danticat] is a master at capturing the inarticulate sorrow and bafflement that evil inspires.
San Francisco Chronicle - Kate Washington
In its varied characters, its descriptive power and its tightly linked images and themes, [The Dew Breaker] is a rewarding and affecting read, rich with insights not just about Haiti but also about the human condition.
Newsday - Daphne Uviller The Dew Breaker is a captivating, eloquent tale told by a nimble storyteller.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer - John Marshall
A serious-minded work of a mature talent, a searching examination of terror and its lingering aftershocks on generations . . . Gripping . . . Powerful.
USA Today - Bob Minzesheimer
It's beautifully written fiction about the real-life horror that is Haiti. Seamlessly blending the personal and political, it deals with what happens to a country and its people when mothers and fathers disappear for their political transgressions.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
Each tale in The Dew Breaker could stand on its own as a beautifully made story, but they come together like jigsaw-puzzle pieces to create a picture of this man's terrible history and his and his victims' afterlife. Some of the puzzle pieces are missing of course, but this is a matter of design. It is a measure of Ms. Danticat's fierce, elliptical artistry that she makes the elisions count as much as her piercing, indelible words.
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The Dew Breaker
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