The Dew Breaker

To me, Elements of Fiction seemed to be basically just a list of definitions and explanations of literary terms that i already knew. As i read it i thought of how each term was used in Danticat's book. The Dew Breaker has a different set of plot and characters in each short story but they all come together to form the plot of the novel as a whole. I enjoyed reading a book that was formatted in this way because my attention span is quite short and the length of the different stories helped me to keep interest in what was going on. It was like a puzzle, trying to put everything together and see how everything was connected or related. The elements of fiction are always present in a story but i guess this reading just gives us the terms to talk about them and point them out.
The way Danticat wrote the different settings throughout the book really gave you an understanding of the mood of the environments that the characters were placed in. It was easy to visualize what was being described. The tone of the novel changed, some parts were obviously more serious than others. There were also many different themes throughout the story; The violence and political corruption in Haiti, culture, family, love, forgiveness, remorse and others.
The research that i did showed me more about Haiti and about the author, Edwidge Danticat. Even though it is a fiction story, there is factual information and characters throughout the novel and Danticat is also obviously writing from some of her own personal life experiences. In my research saw that Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere and among the poorest in the world. Because of it's location and weak government, Haiti is a major transport point for all of the cocaine coming into america from Columbia. Almost all of the Haitian people are descendants of African slaves brought over to harvest sugar cane or mulatto descendants of the French settlers. There was also a ton of depressing information of the widespread poverty devastationg the nation.
At my high school we had an exchange student from Haiti whose name was Emmanuel. He was in my French class but quickly got moved to AP, since French was his main language. He was also in my ceramics class and was extremely talented. His parents were still in Haiti and he was living with some family friend. This book reminded me of him a lot. He would always get asked questions about Haiti and would try to explain things to us about what is was like but i never really understood what he was talking about. Now i do. I actually did enjoy reading this book( waaaaayy more than covering..) and i am looking forward for the movie to come out.