Francesca Momplaisir

The Garden of Broken Things is what I would call a "painful, but necessary" read. It relates the story of three generations of Haitian women, a few who have immigrated to the U.S., the majority of whom still live in Haiti.

The novel opens in New York, where Genevieve is terrified for her teenage son Miles, who has been engaging in risk-taking behavior. She knows how much more likely he is to die from a confrontation with law enforcement than are his white peers. Hoping to give Miles's perspective a shake-up, she flies with him to her former home in rural Haiti—in January of 2010. They, like so many others, find themselves injured, desperately seeking help after the 7.0 earthquake.

Half of the book's chapters are narrated in Genevieve's voice; the other half are narrated in omniscient third person and examine the stories of her female relatives. These inside-of and outside-of perspectives work well to explore the tensions among these women, particularly between those who have remained in Haiti and those who immigrated.

Initially the book is fairly straightforward in its story-telling. We share some of Genevieve's thoughts, but events lead the way. In the latter half, the book digs deeply into the minds of its characters, focusing on how they respond to the emergency, the values they come to recognize in this situation, and their attempts to set things right.

Momplaisir's prose is beautiful, and that beautiful languages emphasizes the vastly different experience's of the novel's women. This is a book that will have you torn between wanting to plough through it as quickly as possible to learn its characters' fates and wanting to savor its sentences and paragraphs slowly so you can enjoy their full richness.

I received a free electronic review copy of this book; the opinions are my own.… (plus d'informations)

This is a story about mothers. And about a country ravaged and decimated by human greed and nature’s fury. It is a story about family and love and hate, and resilience and resurrection.

Genevieve is a Haitian-American mother of two boys, a professional woman who can provide an upscale life for them. But she cannot protect them in a country where a man’s safety is determined by his skin color. She threw out her handsome, charming ex for his philandering. Eldest son Miles has never recovered from that separation. He is courting trouble, and Genevieve is desperate to protect him from harm. Is she failing at her most important job–keeping her son alive?

She decides to take Miles to Haiti, to meet her family and experience their subsistence life, hoping he will understand his good luck, and perhaps begin to value what he has instead of focusing on what is missing.

Generations of women in Genevieve’s family have held onto daughters, their menfolk unreliable. Only daughters will stay to care for the mothers. Ol’ Lady and Ma brought Genevieve to America, but her cousin Ateya was forced to remain by her mother. She is bitter, never having experienced love or safety. American money gave her an education which allowed her to create a plantain farm, and American gifts allow her luxuries like a car and nicer clothes than the her neighbors. Ateya both loves and needs her daughter, while abusing and hating her. Genevieve loves the girl and is determined to bring her to America. Who then would prepare Ateya’s grave and inherit her land?

It is 2010, and during their visit a devastating earthquake destroys the family village and the capital city of Port au Prince. Each mother embarks on a tortuous journey, across Haiti and internally to face their own failings and pain.

Genevieve and Milo’s journey across Haiti takes them from the markets of Port-au-Prince to their ancestral village, and after the earthquake, into the mountains which protected the slaves who fled their slave masters, to northern Cape Haitian, once the French colonialist capital. Momplaisir recreates the horror and devastation of the earthquake, whose epicenter was in Port-au-Prince.

These fierce women, fraught and stretched wire thin, are vividly drawn and unforgettable. The whole history of a nation and a people is revealed in the story. There is a lyricism to the writing, moments of otherworldly beauty and dream-like horror, and devastating insight that sucks your breath away. The book tackles big issues through the lives of ordinary women fighting for the lives of their loved ones and their own survival. It is a shattering read.

I received a book from the publisher. My review is fair and unbiased.… (plus d'informations)

It feels weird to give this four stars because it was such a brutal read. Seriously, there might be a trigger warning for every chapter. But the way the story unfolds was so fantastic. I approached this book thinking it was going to be horror--specifically, a haunted house plot--and it went somewhere altogether different, taking more of a thriller route (though the fantastical house element was still very present). As I was telling a friend yesterday, it takes this boiling-frog tactic, peeling back layer upon layer of atrocity until you're in it, and you don't want to abandon it because you want to make sure characters make it out OK (I don't think I could have stomached this otherwise because it is just so grim). This was also quite an indictment of America's immigration system and anti-Blackness on the whole--while those themes are ever-present, I also feel they have a certain subtlety about them. I will echo other reviewers and say that I would have welcomed more character development, particularly with Lucien, but on the whole, I feel like I got a good perspective given the POVs (and those POVs--dang!).

I am ready for something a little lighter...… (plus d'informations)