In addition to 2017's Book Riot challenge, I have a soft goal of working on my existing read around the world list. This is my choice for Haiti.

Each story left me wanting to know more; each was connected by the bones of one another, through families and history and blood. The first story was my favorite, if not the most arresting (that way lies with Between the Pool and the Gardenias, a dead baby and a delusional woman). Children of the Sea is a back and forth story between a young man and woman, in love and separated. He is fleeing across the ocean into exile from President Duvalier's personal paramilitary force (Tonton Macoute) while she is left behind with her family. They write to each other with no way to send the letters and the story that unfolds is beautiful as it is tragic.

Hers is the more overtly horrifying, expounding on the variety of ways the Macoute terrify the country ("they have this thing now that they do. if they come into a house and there is a son and a mother there, they hold a gun to their heads. they make the son sleep with his mother. if there is a daughter and father, they do the same thing.") His is dreamy, filled with the razor-sharp dangers of long, unprepared voyages at sea. ("Since there are no mirrors, we look at each other's faces to see how frail and sick we are starting to look.")

We hear of them later, in passing, in other stories. It is not a happy ending.

This was a gorgeous collection, filled with love and pain and tragedy and what it means, for Danticat at the very least, to be Haitian.