(Fiction; Vintage Books, 1996)
On Haiti, a round of storytelling might begin with a call, “Krik?” and the response from an eager audience, “Krak!” The tale that follows often exploits local history, politics, and myth to heighten the tension of the plot and to reaffirm the communal ties between the speaker and the listeners. Edwidge Danticat followed her debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory with a collection of nine stories and a short epilogue deftly united by the traditional call-and-response storytelling strategy.
