Krik? Krak!
Danticat's story collection about Haitian women, in Haiti and the diaspora, under Duvalier and after, gave voice to an experience almost entirely absent from American literature. The title comes from the Haitian call-and-response storytelling tradition.
Children of the Sea hits so hard as an opener that later stories struggle to match it: one reader admits “my expectations were set incredibly high” after that first story, and adds flatly that “the rest of the collection just couldn't keep up.” The Brooklyn-set stories toward the end, including Caroline's Wedding, read to some as a noticeably lower gear than the Haiti-set opening stretch, more issue-illustration than the interior lives the strongest pieces manage. A cluster of readers push back on the book's reputation outright, calling the prose merely professional rather than transcendent. Even a reviewer who finishes the whole collection sums it up without heat: “I liked the book but I didn't love it.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
