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A review by shallihavemydwarf
Mouths Don't Speak by Katia D. Ulysse
1.0
This book is not good. There is a lot of pain in these pages, but none of it is allowed to breathe, some of it is not dealt with well, and some is introduced briefly only to never be explained or brought up again.
Spoilers, if you can call them that, to follow.
At the beginning this book is about a Haitian ex-pat dealing with the fallout of the 2010 earthquake. We linger in that pain for about the first 50 pages but then her parents are abruptly alive but they didn’t tell her right away and a year has passed.
Her husband also has PTSD, and that definitely is not given its chance to breathe. There’s some religious trauma that’s mentioned once and never again, and obviously there’s the stuff with her parents that gets the most space but not enough as its should.
And then she goes to Haiti and her husband is really angry because he thinks its not safe, and although he’s acting awful apparently he’s totally justified because she lets her 3 year old daughter drown in a pool the second day there, which is the point at which I was done with this book.
Yes, good fiction writers do mine the depths of pain in their work. But pain itself is not a substitute for depth.
Spoilers, if you can call them that, to follow.
At the beginning this book is about a Haitian ex-pat dealing with the fallout of the 2010 earthquake. We linger in that pain for about the first 50 pages but then her parents are abruptly alive but they didn’t tell her right away and a year has passed.
Her husband also has PTSD, and that definitely is not given its chance to breathe. There’s some religious trauma that’s mentioned once and never again, and obviously there’s the stuff with her parents that gets the most space but not enough as its should.
And then she goes to Haiti and her husband is really angry because he thinks its not safe, and although he’s acting awful apparently he’s totally justified because she lets her 3 year old daughter drown in a pool the second day there, which is the point at which I was done with this book.
Yes, good fiction writers do mine the depths of pain in their work. But pain itself is not a substitute for depth.