Interesting perspectives on Haiti, but ultimately lacks substance.

I read this over twenty years ago, and what I remember most about it is being endlessly frustrated with Sophie's mother, especially when Sophie became a teen and her mom started to molest her regularly to "inspect" her hymen to make sure she was still pure for marriage. I couldn't stand that kind of ignorant paranoia back then, and I doubt I'd tolerate it any better today. I was especially saddened by the desperate lengths that Sophie went through to get herself away from her mother, going so far as to commit an act that would cause herself permanent damage and pain.

I probably should reread this to see if my rating would change for better or worse because I don't think I was quite old enough at the time to fully understand all its themes, but I honestly don't want to go through that frustration again.

Beautifully lyrical and full of hope even during personal tragedy but the ending takes all that building emotion and dashes it. The ending spoiled the book for me. It seemed unnecessarily tragic -- tragic just for the sake of being tragic.

All the things that are never said, never expressed continue to haunt me after several months: Danticat elegantly utilizes silence and ellipses in a way that I'm quite accustomed to in cinema, but rarely find in literature. This means that at first the story seems thin, almost emaciated—but suddenly the absence reveal itself not as lack but meticulous authorial control, and peeking between the spare sentences are glimpses of vast expanses of the utterly inexpressible. The novel is constructed in a way that seems to suggest a collection of short stories revolving around the same small cluster of characters over a lengthy period of time; each "story," however, only takes on resonance when placed within the context of all of the others. The effect is often devastating—and the devastation only intensifies with each passing page—a quality which was also compounded by reading it in the context of the then-contemporaneous earthquake that had just ravaged the country where so much of the book's action takes place.

"In our family we had come to expect that people can disappear into thin air. All traces lost except in the vivid eyes of one's memory."