Critical Essay | Critical Review by Matthew Rothschild

Critical Review by Matthew Rothschild

SOURCE: A review of The Farming of Bones, in Progressive, December, 1998, p. 44.

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

This year, I failed to conserve much time for the rambles of fiction and poetry. But one novel I highly recommend is Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones (Soho Press, 1998). Set in the Dominican Republic in 1937 during the regime of General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the book is told through the voice of Amabelle, a Haitian servant who falls in love with a Haitian sugarcane worker on the plantation.

Danticat's writing is lush. “I can smell his sweat, which is as thick as sugarcane juice when he's worked too much,” Amabelle narrates. “I can still feel his lips, the eggplant-violet gums that taste of greasy goat milk boiled to candied sweetness with mustard-colored potatoes.”

This is a doomed love story, dashed...
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