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Claire of the Sea Light
Author:
Danticat, Edwidge
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Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: PS3554
Print Run: 60000
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ISBN-13: 9780307271792
LCCN: 2012043876
Imprint: Knopf
Publisher: Random House
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Pub Date: 08/27/2013
Availability: Out of Stock Indefinitely
List: $25.95
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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238 pages ; 23 cm
H 8.63",
W 5.99",
D 0.94",
1 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction Finalists
Fiction Core Collection, 18th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 19th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 20th ed.
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Awards:
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Adult Notable Books, ALA
Library Journal Best Books
Library Journal Starred Reviews
New York Times Notable Books
Publishers Weekly Annual Best Books Selections
Publishers Weekly Starred Reviews
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Starred Reviews:
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Library Journal
Publishers Weekly
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TIPS Subjects:
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General Fiction
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BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Literary
FICTION / Cultural Heritage
FICTION / Sagas
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LC Subjects:
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City and town life, Haiti, Fiction
FICTION / Cultural Heritage
FICTION / Literary
FICTION / Sagas
Girls, Crimes against, Fiction
Haiti, Fiction
Missing children, Fiction
Secrets, Fiction
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SEARS Subjects: |
City and town life, Haiti, Fiction
Girls, Fiction
Haiti, Fiction
Missing children, Fiction
Secrets, Fiction
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 05/01/2013 |
| When fisherman Nozias ponders whether to give his little girl away to give her a better life, his choice is denied him once his young daughter goes missing. Nozias and others search high and low for the fisherman's daughter. 256pp., 60K, Auth res: Miami, FL, Tour |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| Library Journal | 09/01/2013 |
| As a native Haitian, Danticat (Brother, I'm Dying) is known for taking an innate cultural understanding and mixing it with a spare, striking writing style, always with marvelous results. The setting for her latest is Ville Rose, a small coastal town in Haiti, where baby Claire is born as her mother dies in childbirth. The novel begins on Claire's seventh birthday and then flows back in time, revisiting previous birthdays and their parallel events. In the village, life and death coexist in heartrending fashion, and the people live with the understanding that any one of them may be instantly and forever altered by natural forces, irrational acts, or simple circumstances. As Claire's father, a poor fisherman, makes a difficult decision, personal histories converge and the village comes together both to mourn a death and to save a life. Throughout, everything seems to be driven by the mystical power of the sea, for which Claire is named. VERDICT A new offering from National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Danticat is always cause for celebration. She has the ability to conjure up the rarified air of Haiti as she manages to pull tightly at one's heartstrings; this novel is no exception. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/4/13.]. Susanne Wells, Indianapolis. 256p. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 05/27/2013 |
| In this gorgeous, arresting, and profoundly vivid new novel, Danticat once again tells a story that feels as mysterious and magical as a folk tale and as effective and devastating as a newsreel. Claire Limye Lanme ("Claire of the Sea Light") is turning seven, and yet her birthday has always been marked by both death and renewal. Claire's mother died in childbirth, and she has been raised by her fisherman father in a shack near the sea. The book begins there--in the shack, on the morning of her birthday--before winding back to tell the story of every previous birthday, and who lived, and died, each year. For some time, Claire's father has considered giving her to a wealthy businesswoman who lost her own daughter, and the heartbreaking question of Claire's fate adds to the novel's suspense, as both the past, and this single day, unfold. In the meantime, Danticat (Krik? Krak!) paints a stunning portrait of this small Haitian town, in which the equally impossible choices of life and death play out every day. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Nicole Aragi Agency. (Aug.). 256p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 09/01/2013 |
| A portrait of Haiti derived from facts alone would be grim. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, suffers from catastrophic deforestation and is frequently visited by the United States military. In 2010, an earthquake added insult to perennial injury. Edwidge Danticat's new novel, Claire of the Sea Light, offers a somewhat different picture. Deforestation rates a mention. And yes, the justice system is corrupt or nonexistent. But her portrait of Haiti's people makes for a crucial difference. The living is decidedly not easy, but there's summertime here in spades. Claire is a young girl whose mother died while delivering her. Her father, adoring but unfit, makes the painful decision to offer her to a woman whose own daughter has died in a traffic accident as comical as it was tragic. In a parallel storyline, the local schoolmaster's son, who joined the "dyaspora" to Miami, returns home and must face having raped his household's servant girl and fathered a son by her. What's more, his one true love was actually a man who fell to bullets long before. Somehow, Danticat's sweet touch makes this bad medicine go down. Her prose is simple and concrete, her characters vivid and warm. There is a timelessness about this tale that elevates it almost to parable. It recalls other novels of the Caribbean, from The Old Man and the Sea to A House for Mr. Biswas. Almost 20 years after Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, Danticat has become the Naipaul of her generation. Though Danticat resides in Miami, this novel's strongest character is the one who stays behind. Her reasoning? "She liked her ghosts nearby.". Kenneth Champeon. 256pg. BOOKPAGE, c2013. |
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| Booklist | 06/01/2013 |
| In interlocking stories moving back and forth in time, Danticat weaves a beautifully rendered portrait of longing in the small fishing town of Ville Rose in Haiti. Seven-year-old Claire Faustin's mother died giving birth to her. Each year, her father, Nozias, feels the wrenching need to earn more money than poor Ville Rose can provide and to find someone to care for Claire. Gaelle Lavaud, a fabric shop owner, is a possible mother for the orphaned child, but she is haunted by her own tragic losses. Bernard, who longs to be a journalist and create a radio show that reflects the gang violence of his neighborhood, is caught in the violence himself. Max Junior returns from Miami on a surreptitious mission to visit the girl he impregnated and left years ago and to remember an unrequited love. Louise George, the raspy voice behind a gossipy radio program, is having an affair with Max Senior, head of the local school, and teaches the ethereally beautiful Claire. Their stories and their lives flow beautifully one into another, all rendered in the luminous prose for which Danticat is known. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The best-selling Danticat's (Brother, I'm Dying, 2007) return to fiction after nine years is sure to be highly anticipated. Bush, Vanessa. 256p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2013. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 07/15/2013 |
| Danticat's first fiction in nine years (The Dew Breaker, 2004, etc.): a snapshot of 21st-century Haiti in the form of stories unfolding around a little girl in the coastal town of Ville Rose. Claire's mother died in childbirth, and on the evening of her seventh birthday in 2009, her father, Nozias, a poor fisherman, agrees to give her to Madame Gaelle, an affluent fabric vendor whose own daughter died three years earlier in a traffic accident. Claire runs off to think things over, and the narrative circles back to chronicle Gaelle's pregnancy and the death of her husband in a random gang shooting. From there, we travel to Cite Pendue, a festering slum on the outskirts of Ville Rose, where Bernard Dorien's tentative steps toward a better life are violently halted after he is accused of complicity in that shooting. The intricate, sometimes-intimate interconnections between rich and poor in a small town are evident in the story of Bernard's friend Max Ardin Jr., son of the elite local private school's arrogant proprietor, and Flore, the family's maid, whom he raped and impregnated 10 years earlier. Flore gets her revenge by exposing his crime on the popular local radio program Di Mwen--Creole for "tell me." (Danticat makes evocative use of Creole's distinctive French/African cadences throughout, and the novel's title translates her protagonist's full Creole name, Claire Limye Lanme.) Louise George, host of Di Mwen, has her own reasons for humiliating the Ardins; motivations are never simple in Danticat's nuanced presentation. Her prose has the shimmering simplicity of a folk tale and the same matter-of-fact acceptance of life's cruelties and injustices. Yet, despite the unsparing depiction of a corrupt society in which the police are as brutal and criminal as gang members, there's tremendous warmth in Danticat's treatment of her characters, who are striving for human connection in a hard world. Both lyrical and cleareyed, a rare and welcome combination. 256pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2013. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 02/04/2013 |
| Danticat's last book, the memoir Brother, I'm Dying, was a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and a National Book Award finalist, and her fiction has won accolades, too. Fans will be pleased that this best-selling MacArthur Fellow has returned to fiction for the first time in nine years. Claire Limye Lanme ("Claire of the Sea Light"), whose mother died in childbirth and whose fisherman father has made the wrenching decision to give her away so that she can have a better life, goes missing just before her seventh birthday. As the entire community searches for her, secrets emerge that clarify our relationships with one another and with the natural world, even as we see the beauty and heartbreak of Haiti. With a multicity tour to New York, Boston (and New England), Los Angeles, Miami, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC. 256p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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9780307271792,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 09/01/2013 |
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