Everything Inside

 Hello Interwebs!

This month I actually finished the current pick for Reese's Book Club which is the book club run by actress Reese Witherspoon. I primarily participate in this via Instagram but the website also has links to the Facebook page and the goodreads group. The August pick was Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat. This is a short story collection that the Book Club gave a reading schedule of 2 stories a week for. I followed the reading schedule until close to the end where I read the last two stories the same week as the previous two due to my own work schedule. All of these stories take place in either the US or Haiti (with the exception of one that takes place on a small fictional island in the Caribbean) and they were all really interesting. As always there will be spoilers following the cover photo. 

Dorsas is the first story in the collection and is about a woman named Elsie who is working as an in-home caregiver when her ex-husband calls telling her that his girlfriend was kidnapped in Haiti. She runs through the gamut of emotions considering the girlfriend was once in a relationship with both of them while they were married and broke up their marriage. The ex gets her to wire money to him, $5000 which is most of her savings, to help pay the ransom and its only when she sees an old friend at the bar where she met her husband that she finds out that the girlfriend was never kidnapped and it was a scheme to extort money from their friends to start a new life. Elsie and the bartender friend end up sleeping together in a commiseration of being duped by these two they once considered friends. This one was good but not one of my favorites in the collection. I gave this story a 3.5/5 rating. 

In the Old Days is the second story in the collection. This is about a young woman named Nadia who recieves a phone call from her father's wife that he is dying and wants to see her. Her father had left New York where Nadia lives with her mother to return to Haiti and since her mother had no desire to return to Haiti, leaves her and her mother in the United States. She found out she was pregnant after he left and filed for divorce. Nadia debates going to see the father she's never met but her mother urges her to and she reluctantly agrees to fly to Miami where her father and his wife are staying to see him. She arrives in Miami and goes to the house in Little Haiti and her father's wife sits her down to talk to her, she tells the daughter the story of their life together. Their friends come and urge her to eat and pray for her before taking her to the room where her father is. It's only once she's there that she realizes that her father is dead and his wife tells her that he died just before she landed. She stays with him for a time and then comes out and its only then that the doctor in the house declares her father has died. This story was really about a daughter coming to terms with the fact that she has a father she doesn't know and will never know, a father who didn't know had a daughter until she was a teenager. When she's in the house they're staying out there are no pictures of him before he got so sick and so she can't compare the skeletal figure in the bed with what he would have looked like alive. This story to me was much better than the first one and had a peek into Haitian funeral customs at the very end which was very interesting. I gave this story a 4/5 star rating. 

The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special is about a woman who owns a hotel in Port-au-Prince whose nanny is diagnosed with AIDS. The young woman's family has worked for them for quite a while and they are like family. They find a doctor who will treat the girl's AIDS and related illnesses, a Canadian man who also tests the family she belongs to and the family she works for. He claims he can treat it with a single pill. After the second month on the pills the doctor disappears and they have to find a new one. This one, a Cuban doctor, runs tests again and starts on a complex regiment of pills after talking to her about the previous regimen he sees the doctor's name and reveals that he is a quack who was giving her a placebo which necessitated his fleeing back to Canada. At the end the girl finally tells her boss how she got AIDS. It was a man who gave her a ring (with a glass gem that looks flashy but is worthless) who promised to marry her and then disappeared. They call those rings, which are cheaply obtained at various places nearby, the Port-au-Prince special or the love-me-and-leave-me rings. This story was also good. The situation with the nanny is a situation that isn't limited to just Haiti or even just poor girls, although I'm sure it is more prevalent with lower socio-economic classes. Men frequently lie to get exactly what they want from someone who is less than willing. I know that so-called medical professionals take advantage of people's trusting and ignorance to dupe them out of money. There was a story about a missionary in Africa who had no medical credentials but still opened up a clinic there and caused injury, illness, and death without repercussions because when she was caught she fled to avoid consequences. I gave this one a 5/5 star rating. 

The Gift was probably my least favorite story in the book. This wasn't bad necessarily but definitely not one of my favorites. It's about a woman named Anika who promised a man named Thomas a gift so he would agree to have dinner with her. Thomas was real estate developer who'd been approached by Anika who is an art dealer to use his real estate business to sell her clients' artwork. Over time she pursued him and they began an illicit love affair. Over the course of the meal it is learned that his wife had discovered the affair and he had taken her and their baby daughter to Haiti to visit family and work on their marriage. While in Haiti there was an earthquake that trapped them in the rubble of their house. His wife and daughter died adn he lost a leg, the three spending days trapped in the rubble before rescue. He reveals that after he was released from the hospital he went to a psychiatric hospital for a long time before he finally just got back to work. She says she wanted to meet to end their affair face-to-face and he says that it was over as soon as his wife adn child died. She gets him to come to her apartment saying she has a gift for him, which is a painting she painted of his wife and daughter as birds. He says he'd rather have a sketch of them looking older, and says he might ask for that later. After he leaves she thinks about the miscarriage she had and that maybe her unborn baby is with his wife and child. This story was fine, but I didn't really feel much about it one way or the other. The narrator, Anika, seemed obsessive and possessive of the man who didn't seem like he wanted to be there or even acknowledge she existed. The portrait she drew seemed odd and more like it was intended to hurt him more than anything. All in all, not my favorite and I gave it a 3/5.

Hot-Air Balloons  is about two college roommates. One is Neah, privileged young woman who went to Haiti to work with a women's organization and specifically a rape recovery center over Thanksgiving. The other Lucy, the child of poor migrant farm workers. After going to Haiti, Neah sends an email to Lucy and her parents saying that she will be dropping out of school and going to work for the women's organization full-time. At Neah's father's behest, Lucy goes and has coffee with Neah to find out why she isn't coming back and to talk to her. Neah tells her how what she saw in Haiti affected her and how she wants to do some good. The story is anchored by Neah telling her about the bags of water hung in the doorways to keep flies and other flying pests out, an image she had tattooed on her chest but looked like hot air balloons. Lucy relates that story with the tattoo of a pit bull on her wrist which is from an anecdote where she hit it with the car after getting her license and her parents had her flee the scene of the accident, afraid of the consequences poor migrants would have for hitting it. At the end of the story Neah returns to college, saying she feels everything too deeply and will volunteer with the organization while going to college instead of dropping out. This story was good and I related to Neah since I also worked for a rape crisis support organization when I was initially in college and I know first hand what it is like to respond to an emergency room to support a young woman during the exam and evidence collection process. I gave this story a 4/5.

Sunrise, Sunset is one of the most complex stories in the collection and is told from two viewpoints: a mother and daughter surrounding the birth and christening of the daughter's firstborn. The mother (grandmother) is suffering from dementia of some kind. She is increasingly forgetful and erratic to the point where they can't hide it from the rest of the family anymore. The daughter (mother) has just had her first child, a son, seven months before and is suffering from what I recognize as postpartum depression. The mother is very critical of her daughter's experience and the help she gets from her husband and in-laws in taking care of her son. The daughter is concerned about her mother's state of mind and her mother's illness, especially in regards to her own child. Events come to a head when the mother divests from reality completely during the luncheon after the baby's christening. They talk the mother down from the balcony where she's holding hte baby over the railing and after the baby is safe in his mother's arms, his grandmother is taken to have a psych evaluation done. Her husband had just revealed to his daughter that he knows that he's going to have to find a place for his wife as her illness has gotten to where he can't take care of her reliably anymore. This story I really felt as both a woman who has an eleven month old son at home and as a woman who has worked in senior care for the last 5 years and is currently a CNA at a skilled nursing facility. A lot of my work experience has been in not just senior care but in memory care specifically. I know what it's like from all the perspectives: the patient, the family, and the caregivers. After the birth of my son I didn't have depression so much as postpartum anxiety. I also rely heavily on my partner for help with my son as well as my own counselor and I'm very grateful for the support I have. I know many people aren't that lucky. I thought this story was beautiful and poignant and very much relevant to all stages of life. I gave this story a 5/5. 

Seven Stories is about two childhood friends and their reunion as adults. The girls knew each other for several months one year when Callie and her mother lived with her aunt next door to the narrator, Kim. Callie is the wife of the prime minister of a nameless Caribbean island and she was in New York that year because her father, also a prime minister had been assassinated. Over the story you get the story of the girls as children in New York and the title is in reference to a game they played where you told a story for every year of your life, in this case seven because they were seven when they knew each other. Kim is a writer for an online publication and it was a story about this year when they were seven and their friendship that Callie saw and caused her to reach out. Kim is spending New Years with her old friend and her husband at the Prime Minister's estate on the island. She sees the falseness of their public personas and the staged visits ot hospitals contrasted with her own tour of the island when she gets her guide to show her a real hospital and ends up giving a little girl and her mother who are impoverished money to help with the hospital. It's an interesting story of survival and then privilege and how your privilege blinds you to the suffering of lower classes and why they might not view events the same way you do. I gave this one a 3.5/5.

Without Inspection is the final story in the collection and is told from the perspective of a man who has fallen from the scaffolding high atop a building during construction while he's falling. His name is Arnold and he is an undocumented migrant who came from a Caribbean island and swam from a boat to shore. When he arrived on shore he met Darline who gets him off the beach before the authorities arrive. She takes him to a shelter and helps him establish his new life. Then she becomes his girlfriend and they are raising her small son, Paris, together. Darline's husband, Paris's father drowned when the three of them came from their own boat and Darline started helping others like her when he died and Paris was left special needs. It tells the story of their life together and he imagines visiting them one last time: singing with her and whispering in Paris's ear so they'll remember him. Then he dies peacefully, finding the freedom he'd spent his life searching for. I also really liked this one and gave it a 4.5/5 stars. 

As a whole I really liked this collection of short stories. They were quick reads but thoughtful ones. On average I gave this book a 4/5 stars on goodreads and I would highly recommend it. It was read from August 10 to August 22nd. This was definitely a winner for me and I appreciate the celebrity book clubs I follow because they enable me to pick up books I wouldn't otherwise. 

Happy Reading!

Richelle and Emma