Edwidge Danticat - The Farming of Bones
Soho Press

Edwidge Danticat, a young Haitian-American writer, blends her love of history with impeccable story telling in her second novel, "The Farming of Bones."

Set in the Dominican Republic and Haiti during the slaughter of 1937, the story is told through the eyes of a young Haitian woman working for a Dominican family. Raised by the family after her parents' death, Amabelle struggles between a sense of belonging and a fear that she can never belong anywhere. The only person who can make her forget, albeit temporarily, the gruesome death of her parents in the Massacre River is her boyfriend Sebastien who has ghosts of his own to contend with.

Though her life is by no means easy or safe at the beginning of the novel, there is little foreshadowing of the anguish and horror which the slaughter brings. Throughout the story Amabelle often appears understandably passive and powerless. "The Farming" paints a picture of a woman whose life is shaped by fate and controlled by forces too powerful for her to contend with as she fights merely to survive. In the world of the Dominican Republic in the late 1930s, for a Haitian merely to exist is a triumph.

Despite the sometimes grisly backdrop, Danticat weaves a beautiful story. The prose is elegant and unpretentious and she wisely lets the characters' actions take the fore stage while the emotions, which can be all too easily imagined, are left to the reader to supply. Throughout the work, her attention to detail and acknowledgment of the tiny gentleness which can exist even in a brutal realm make the novel a poignant, unforgettable lesson in history and the darkest aspects of human nature.