In this brief review of Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, Mary Mackay outlines the pain and struggle of the women in the novel, and describes it as a compelling record of the Haiti that Danticat wishes to be remembered, "a rich landscape of memory."

Edwidge Danticat dedicates her powerful first novel to "The brave women of Haiti . . . on this shore and other shores. We have stumbled but we will not fall." Such optimism is extraordinary, given the everyday adversity faced by the women whose stories are interwoven with that of Sophie, the narrator.

Grandmother Ife, mother Martine, aunt Atie, and daughter Sophie (and later Sophie's daughter, Brigitte) are rooted as firmly in their native Haitian soil as they are bound to one another, despite the ocean, experiences, and years that separate them. The ties to Haiti, the women's certainty of meeting there at the "very end of...