The main character Amabelle is a Haitian born orphan. She is the servant of a Dominican family consisting of a widowed father and his young daughter who happens to be the same age as Amabelle. Amabelle was discovered by the widow and his daughter by the river the same day her own parents drowned. Amabelle's lover Sebastien works 'farming the bones" which is harvesting sugarcane. Their lives change forever when terror, madness and murder erupts throughout Alegria.

The beginning of this book was quite intriguing but Amabelle's latter years did not quite take shape. It seems as if the author just did not know what direction Amabelle's life should have taken after the massacre. I was very disappointed when Sebastien was simply lost in the narrative when he was lost during the massacre. It is never confirmed if he is killed during the massacre or if he escaped. We are left to assume the worse. Amabelle escapes the massacre with Sebastien's best friend Yves. Even though Amabelle spends the rest of her life living with Yves and his mother, Amabelle and Yves never really form a close relationship of any kind. The most interesting part of the narrative for me is when death, during the massacre, was determined by whether or not a person could pronounce the Spanish translation of the word parsley. The Dominican people knew that the Kreyol speaking Haitians could not pronounce the trill of the "r" of perejil which was the Spanish translation of parsley. This reminded me of the word "shibboleth" used in the Bible to determine the regional origin of the displaced Ephraimites (Judges 12:5-6). I cannot help but wonder did the author have this in mind when writing this area of the text. Initially, I could not put this book down but the last stretch was hard for me to work through. I hated the ending. It was so elusive that I wanted to scream.

This was my first Edwidge Danticat novel and I look forward to reading more of her work. Danticat's writing style reminds me of Toni Morrison's but without the complexity. Her characters have a lot of ambiguity like Morrison. I like the overall writing style of Danticat but I did not like the structure of this particular novel. ( )

I absolutely loved The Farming of Bones. I had to read this for my college literature class. I think it's the first historical fiction that I've read, so I wasn't too into the book at first. However, Danticat told the story beautifully. Her writing was so real that I felt like I was there, first hand, experiencing what I was reading. She writes so vividly that she had me turning the page to see what was going to happen next. I've started reading her other books, because I love her writing so much. Actually, this book is what got me into reading historical fiction! Highly recommended!! ( )

Heart-wrenching story set against the very real and disturbing 1937 Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic where tens of thousands of Haitians were slaughtered. Almost missed my subway stop a few mornings this week, that's how intense it gets. ( )

An absolutely captivating story about the Haitian massacre in the Dominican Republic. I don't know about you, but I didn't learn about this in school. I should have, rather than be told "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492" about a billion times. One of my favorites in 2008. ( )

I was inspired to read this by the discussion about Haitian literature in the Reading Globally group. The novel is set at the time of the Haitian massacre in the Dominican Republic in 1937. The Haitian narrator, Amabelle, a maid for a Dominican family since she was a child, has to flee for her life when the Dominicans turn on their Haitian workers - mainly labourers in the sugar cane plantations and domestic workers. Unlike thousands of her countrymen, she survives, but the memory of all she has lost (lover, home, life as she knew it, her future) and the knowledge of what her people suffered exert more of a pull on her than the present, and the reader is forced to question whether survival at such a price is worth it. The almost unbearable sadness of the book - personal loss interwoven with national tragedy, the pain of exile and separation - is skilfully, beautifully expressed, and still haunts me now, weeks after I read the novel.