SOURCE: A review of The Farming of Bones, in Nation, Vol. 267, No. 16, November 16, 1998, p. 62.

In the following review, Jaffrey offers a positive assessment of The Farming of Bones.

With Hurricane Georges devastating the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and the beating of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by members of the NYPD a recent memory, Edwidge Danticat's new novel, The Farming of Bones, feels particularly timely. Its subject is the overnight massacre, in 1937, of between 15,000 and 18,000 Haitians, at the secret instructions of Gen. Rafael Trujillo Molina, the military dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for thirty-one years. But because the large themes of trauma and collective memory are in the hand of a gifted fiction writer, the novel cannot be summarized by casual reference to genocidal fact. Indeed, some of the most interesting writers today—Toni Morrison in Paradise, Caryl Phillips in Cambridge—are blending history and fiction, imparting information...