Charleston County Public Library

The dew breaker, Edwidge Danticat

eng

no index present

fiction

The dew breaker

Edwidge Danticat

A book that asks hard questions about truth, deception, responsibility, and redemption, The Dew Breaker is a powerful exploration of the way history, both personal and political, affects those who are swept up in its sometimes violent path. As the book opens, a young Haitian-American sculptor named Ka and her father have traveled from Brooklyn to Miami to deliver the sculpture she has made of him to a famous actress. But this tribute to her father, this permanent representation of him, brings his secret life in Haiti to the surface. As he plunges the statue into a pond, he dredges up his own submerged past. Ka's father was a "dew breaker, " one who arrives in the early morning hours to set houses afire, to arrest and torture and kill. The horrible scar on his own face came not from an oppressor, as Ka had believed, but from one of his own victims, a minister he murdered in Haiti many years ago. The identity of that minister is the most stunning revelation in a book filled with revelations. And it is by the most skillful narrative means that Danticat holds this truth in suspension for the length of the book. From the moment of Ka's father's confession in the opening pages to the closing chapter's full account of his final act of violence some thirty years earlier, Danticat explores the complex and intertwined stories of some of the people most deeply and painfully affected by the actions of the "dew breaker." The result is a book that vividly evokes both life in Haiti under a brutal dictatorship and the experience of Haitian immigrants living in America but still in the grip of that past

The book of the dead -- Seven -- Water child -- The book of miracles -- Night talkers -- The bridal seamtress -- Monkey tails -- The funeral singer -- The dew breaker