Danticat, “Look at you,” he says, taking my face into one of his spacious bowl-hands, where the palms have lost their lifelines to the machetes that cut the cane.  “Yours are glowing like a Christmas lantern, even with this skin that is the color of driftwood ashes in the rain.”(1)

I selected this image as Danticat mentions lanterns many times in her book, and selected this passage because it is about Amabelle and Sebastien.  I like the play on shadow and light, dreams and nightmares, aloneness and security.   There are many moving passages through out this book, and I really enjoyed it in its entirety. 

I was especially drawn to this bold text, where much of it read like poetry and gave one another glimpse into Amabelle, Sebastien, her mother and father.  What was as rewarding was her speaking about her parents in those special moments they shared before she lost them. Danticat, “My father was joyful, contrary to my mother’s quietly unhappy ways,” I admit. “He used to pick me up and try to throw me up in the air, even when I became too heavy to be carried, even when everything he did ceased to seem like a miracle to me.” (33)

Danticat's work so rich that one could smell the lemongrass, the sugarcane, see Man Rapadou’s house, the “red satin ribbon”(67).  The tragedy that unfolded was so moving and sad your heart just aches.  Last line in Danticats poem “Dawn” Dawn has not yet come, We want to stop crying, The funeral masses have been sung, We can not longer weep, Come on family, Let us mourn.