The Washington Post
She delivers her most beautiful and arresting prose when describing the most brutal atrocities and their emotional aftermath. In Danticat's hands, pain becomes poetry as a preacher is dragged to the torture chamber of a Haitian jail. He feels his sense of self being left behind, "with bits of his flesh in the ground, morsel by morsel being scraped off by pebbles, rocks, tiny bottle shards, and cracks in the concrete." In reconstructing such specific and personal memories of a brutal political past, Danticat awakens us to the beauty and terror that can exist in everyday life in Haiti. The Dew Breaker is a brilliant book, undoubtedly the best one yet by an enormously talented writer. — Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
The New York Times
Each tale in The Dew Breaker could stand on its own as a beautifully made story, but they come together like jigsaw-puzzle pieces to create a picture of this man's terrible history and his and his victims' afterlife. Some of the puzzle pieces are missing of course, but this is a matter of design. It is a measure of Ms. Danticat's fierce, elliptical artistry that she makes the elisions count as much as her piercing, indelible words. — Michiko Kakutani
USA Today
It's beautifully written fiction about the real-life horror that is Haiti. Seamlessly blending the personal and political, it deals with what happens to a country and its people when mothers and fathers disappear for their political transgressions. Bob Minzesheimer
Publishers Weekly
Haitian-born Danticat's third novel (after The Farming of Bones and Breath, Eyes, Memory) focuses on the lives affected by a "dew breaker," or torturer of Haitian dissidents under Duvalier's regime. Each chapter reveals the titular man from another viewpoint, including that of his grown daughter, who, on a trip she takes with him to Florida, learns the secret of his violent past and those of the Haitian boarders renting basement rooms in his Brooklyn home. This structure allows Danticat to move easily back and forth in time and place, from 1967 Haiti to present-day Florida, tracking diverse threads within the larger narrative. Some readers may think that what she gains in breadth she loses in depth; this is a slim book, and Danticat does not always stay in one character's mind long enough to fully convey the complexities she seeks. The chapters-most of which were published previously as stories, with the first three appearing in the New Yorker-can feel more like evocative snapshots than richly textured portraits. The slow accumulation of details pinpointing the past's effects on the present makes for powerful reading, however, and Danticat is a crafter of subtle, gorgeous sentences and scenes. As the novel circles around the dew breaker, moving toward final episodes in which, as a young man and already dreaming of escape to the U.S., he performs his terrible work, the impact on the reader hauntingly, ineluctably grows. 60,000 first printing. (Mar. 15) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
For her latest novel, the Haitian-born Danticat draws on her early childhood during the Duvaliers' dictatorships. Dew breaker was a name given to members of the tonton macouts, who tortured and killed Haitians on behalf of the Duvaliers; Danticat's protagonist gained special notoriety for his barbarity. After the collapse of Baby Doc Duvalier's regime, he fled to New York City, but neither he nor his victims can escape the past. Though the dew breaker is the centerpiece of the novel, Danticat successfully integrates his story with the stories of those who survived his brutality-and those whose family members did not. The clear and resonant prose moves easily from past to present (and back again), but the past is this novel's strongest focus. Remembering his vicious tactics, one victim remarks, "You never know anyone as intimately as you know someone like this"-a peculiar intimacy Danticat explores before ending with a surprising twist; the dew breaker marries his last victim's sister. This tour de force will certainly earn Danticat the same high acclaim she gained from her three previous works, which include National Book Award finalist Krik? Krak! Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/03.]-Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon Lib., Eugene Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A torturer-in-hiding examined from multiple angles by family and victims. In this third novel from Danticat (The Farming of Bones, 1998, etc.), the past has a way of intruding on everyday life no matter how all of the characters try to stop it. Of course, when the past is as horrific as it is here, that should come as no surprise. The title comes from a Haitian term for torturer, the black-hearted Tonton Macoutes who enforced the Duvalier regime (" 'They'd also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they'd take you away' "). The particular dew breaker at the heart of this story is an old man when we first meet him, on a trip he's taking with his artist daughter down to Florida to deliver a sculpture she'd been commissioned to make by a famous Haitian-American actress. Each chapter brings another view of this same man, who escaped his crimes in Haiti to hide out as a barber in Brooklyn, and each is related by different people who knew him-his wife, a lover, one of his victims. The structure, however, isn't necessarily one of slowly revealed mystery, an approach that could have cheapened the tale's formidable emotional impact. Even though we learn more and more about the dew breaker as the story progresses-and by the end have been firsthand witnesses to his foul methods-Danticat seems ultimately less interested in him than in those around him, those who speak personally about the suffering he caused. It's a wise choice, in that there is comparatively little that can be learned from practitioners of evil, whose motives usually come down to simple desires for money or power. Danticat's voice is that of a seasoned veteran, her pages wise and saddened, struggling on "thependulum between regret and forgiveness." Searing fiction with the lived-in feel of the best memoir. First printing of 60,000. Agent: Nicole Aragi/Aragi Inc.
