Pace

Danticat's story begins slowly, told with a languid, measured pace, set in a traditional agrarian society, and the first scene, after a dreamlike encounter between Amabelle and her lover Sebastien, involves the birth of twins, a boy and a girl, to her wealthy employer. At first, the book seems very much like many weighty classics of nineteenthcentury literature, which begin with the birth of the protagonist.

Danticat turns this expectation upside down, however: the real hero of the story is not either of the children, but Amabelle, the servant, who midwifes them using half-remembered skills taught by her healer parents. Tinges of violence creep into the story: the twins' father kills a sugar cane worker when he runs into him with his car, but is never officially brought to justice, because the cane workers' lives are considered expendable and because he is a ranking military officer. In addition...