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Book Reviewed by:From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love.
Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and intimate, as it explores the forces that pull us together, or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.
In these eight powerful, emotionally absorbing stories, a romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends; a marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences; a young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival; two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives; a baby's christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new; a man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose.
This is the indelible work of a keen observer of the human heart--a master at her best.
Dosas
Elsie was with Gaspard, her live-in renal-failure patient, when her ex-husband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince. Elsie had just fed Gaspard some cabbage soup when her cell phone rang. Gaspard was lying in bed, his head carefully propped on two pillows, his bloated and pitted face angled toward the bedroom skylight, which allowed him a slanted view of a giant coconut palm that for years had been leaning over the lakeside house in Gaspard's single-family development.
Elsie pressed the phone between her left ear and shoulder and used her right hand to wipe a lingering piece of cabbage from Gaspard's chin. Waving both hands as though conducting an orchestra, Gaspard signaled to her not to leave the room while motioning for her to carry on with her conversation. Turning her attention from Gaspard to the phone, Elsie moved it closer to her lips and asked, "Ki lè?"
"This morning." Sounding ...
National Book Critics Circle Awards
2019
These are stories about the breakdown of human connections, of communication, of the body and mind. The Haitian settings are largely atmospheric—important, but hardly the most interesting aspect of the collection...If you like character-driven fiction with emotional depth and complexity, narrated by an author with a poet's linguistic sensibility, don't pass this one up...continued
Full Review
(595 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Several stories in Edwidge Danticat's Everything Inside take place in Florida's Little Haiti neighborhood, a popular residence for Haitian immigrants and exiles (along with individuals from other Caribbean nations) located in Miami Dade County. The neighborhood has a population of 28,000 people, with 73 percent identifying as Black and 20 percent as Hispanic. Forty-one percent of the neighborhood's residents were born outside the United States. As a whole, Miami Dade County is home to the largest population of Haitians
in the nation.
Originally called Lemon City, Little Haiti was settled shortly after the Civil War by homesteaders. Haitians began arriving to the area in droves in the 1960s and 70s, fleeing the brutal dictatorship of ...
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