Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
3.5 starsMaybe this is the beginning of madness...Forgive me for what I am saying.Read it...quietly, quietly.-Osip MandelstamThe title of this book "Dew Breaker" "comes from a Creole phrase which refers to those who break the serenity of the grass in the morning dew. It is a Creole nickname for torturer."The "Dew Breakers" are a group of volunteers who tortured and killed thousands of civilians under the regimes of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti.This book is a combination of short st...
This book of stories, strung like beads on the fibers of a common source, from differing viewpoint seems to reflect the heartbreak of Haiti, most of which confounded me. This is not my usual reading fare, but I am working through a list of books that must be read before I die. . .so this one now is done. Read. Not sure what it has brought me. When I complete a book and have that thought, I'm left with a feeling of failure. Edwidge Danicat (what a lovely name. . . .) does have a wonderful way of
The Dew Breaker is a book organized into 9 sections (chapters), which are all perfectly able to stand alone as short stories. Each chapter features different characters and different points of view, and seem random at first, but by the end you realize they’re all interlocking and related in some way. The novel is about an unnamed prison guard/torturer who was part of the Tonton Macoutes, the voluntary militia under Jean-Claude Duvalier’s reign in Haiti. The book is just as much about his life an...
Agony and Atonement...The Dew Breaker is my first taste of the gift of storytelling by Edwidge Danticat......but it won't be my last! As the novel opens, revealing shocking secrets of the past, it's clear that the reader will not be disappointed. The Dew Breaker's title comes from a Creole phrase referring to `Tontons Macoutes' (Haitian volunteer torturers) during the regime of the Duvaliers in Haiti. They would often come in the early dawn to take their victims away...thus the broke the serenit...
Maybe this is the beginning of madness...Forgive me forwhat I am saying.Read it... quietlyquietly.~ Osip MandelstamThe Dew Breaker is interesting as the contents can be read either as short separate stories or as a single novel as the stories are all linked. These well-written stories are about 'a dew breaker' (a torturer), who commits serious crimes in his country, Haiti, then moves to America and takes up a new identity. An ordinary immigrant in the adopted country, who holds terrible secrets
One of the things I love about GR is discovering new authors and new books. One day I happened to read a review of The Dew Breaker, both an author and book I never heard of before. I was interested. A number of days later I went to my library book sale and came across this book and snatched it up. Didn't even think twice about it. Then, it sat on my shelves for two years. Finally, the day came and I picked it up and I was hooked.The Dew Breaker is a series of stories of various peoples lives in
There are three stories in ‘The Dew Breaker’ by Edwidge Danticat, that have Anne, her daughter, and husband as the central characters. ‘The Book of the Dead’ is the first story and here we learn that the father, the subject of his daughter, Ka’s sculpting talents, is not who she has always believed him to be, a man who spent a great many years in prison. The sculpture she creates represents her idea of who her father had been as a prisoner. When they are taking the sculpture to a renowned Haitia...
These are interconnected stories which revolve around a former Haitian torturer now living a quiet life in the United States, his former identity known only to his wife. The characterizations were fantastic. The experiences of Haitians living through a brutal dictatorship and its aftermath in exile was powerfully conveyed.
3.5 starsThe Dew Breaker is a story in nine parts. Each part could be read as its own short story, and I vacillate between liking and disliking this structure. Usually I'd enjoy something like this, but the stories are at times so loosely connected that it's hard to see the bigger picture. And yet, part of me likes the way the author drops information ever so carefully, that it makes a sort of puzzle out of the reading.Regardless, the stories are beautifully written and tragically told. You get
Students will like this book. Very moving, thoughtful, and well-constructed.
This book. This fantastic gem of a book. This little book containing an abundance of talent is one of the best books I've read this year. This book handles trauma the way it is experienced, and that is saying something. This is a collection of short stories that are not overtly complex or long, yet, Danticat is able to weave a story through each story, thus, connecting them all together. The messages she sends to the reader are not told to you directly and this is very crucial to the story. You
This is a terrific book. Don’t @ me. The Dew Breaker reminds me of The Things They Carried, but centers on Haitian expats coping with haunting reverberations of the Duvalier regime instead of on American veterans living with memories of the war in Vietnam. The writing is lovely. The characters well-imagined and heartbreaking. The stories are loosely (but masterfully) connected. Together they flesh out a world that is much greater than the sum of its parts. I picked this up under the mistaken imp...
A quiet Haitian man in NYC with an artist daughter, a secret he and his wife have been hiding from her from their time in Haiti is slowly unearthed: this is the basic plot of Danticat’s beautifully written novel. The nine parts could stand alone as short stories, but they work together to show the effects of revolution, violence, and the choices made during those times on all the people around you, whether you’re aware of them or not. The stories and the topics in this novel cover kept calling t...
