Details
Synopsis
A dew breaker is a torturer for the Tonton Macoutes during Haiti's Duvalier regime. In Edwige Danticat's third novel--a group of closely related stories--the focus is on a former dew breaker who escaped retribution by changing his identity and moving to Brooklyn, where he worked as a barber for many years. Now elderly, he is en route to Florida with his daughter. As we see him from a variety of angles, through the eyes of his victims as well as his family and friends, the man is exposed for the vicious killer he was, with a past that cannot be erased by his exemplary life in his later years.
| Size | | Length: | 256 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 15.2 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "My father is gone. I'm slouched in a cast-aluminum chair across from two men, one the manager of the hotel where we're staying and the other a policeman. They're both waiting for me to explain what's become of him, my father."
Industry Reviews
"Danticat's voice is that of a seasoned veteran, her pages wise and saddened....Searing fiction with the lived-in feel of the best memoir."
Kirkus (01/15/2004)
"Brilliantly, Danticat puts the barber's revelation to his daughter at the start of the collection and then goes on to tell everyone else's stories, as if to remind him and us that his victims will be the final judges. THE DEW BREAKER is a captivating, eloquent tale told by a nimble storyteller...."
Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.) - Daphne Uviller (03/07/2004)
"[Danticat] has written a Haitian truth: prisoners all, even the jailers. With neither forgiveness nor contempt, she sets it upon a fulcrum from where she's had the courage and art to displace the world even as she is displaced by it."
New York Times Book Review - Richard Eder (03/21/2004)
"[A]n eloquent, atmospheric work, which evokes New York's Prospect Park as evocatively as it does the scenery of Haiti....THE DEW BREAKER is a disquieting and remarkable book...."
Times Literary Supplement - Lorna Gibb (05/07/2004)
"Edwidge Danticat...manages to take...difficult historical and political material and, with it, to weave a brilliant work of literary fiction....Danticat...subtly weav[es] fact and fiction together to create an organic, luminous, and unexpected whole, something much larger than a well-constructed backdrop against which historical events can take place."
Ruminator Review - Julie Schumacher
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