4/5 stars
I enjoyed this book! I really did! I was pretty much hooked from the first page, drawn into the story, and I never felt bored or tired of the story. I laughed out loud, and really cared about the characters and what happened to them. They were fully three-dimensional, all of them like people I could run into on the street in real life.
I also loved how the book included all kinds of extra things to tell the story besides just Alaine's narrative, like emails, letters, or newspaper articles. This made the story even more engaging and made me feel like I was part of what was happening.
The ONLY thing, the ONE thing that just made the book not as good as it COULD be, that made me take away ONE star, was that it always felt like the writers were trying to do too much and tell too many stories. I could never figure out exactly what story they were trying to tell because there were too many. Was this a story about rediscovering one's homeland, and in the process exposing readers to a new culture and country? Absolutely. Haiti was like its own character, presented in a loving and nuanced way, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Alaine's relationship to it, as well as its unique history and culture.
But is Dear Haiti, Love Alaine ALSO a story of a complicated mother-daughter relationship? Or of grappling with a family member contracting a difficult illness? Or of a shady business-government conspiracy that includes secrets and corruption? Or of vodou and magic that may or may not be real?
ding ding ding, if you said "all of the above" then you're the winner. And those are just the main plots! They're all so interesting though, aren't they? There were just as many, if not more side plots of a romance, new and old friendships, examining how American society treats black women, the relationship between a single-parent father and his daughter, and a failed school assignment.
So there's a lot going on! Every plotline was interesting, engaging, and meaningful, and added something important to the story. However, with so many different storylines being explored, some of them would get ignored for a period of time while others were being focused on. All of the storylines were not as fully explored as they could have been if there had been less of them, with everything pretty much at a surface level. And at the end of the book most of the storylines weren't as satisfactorily and completely wrapped up as they probably would have been if there had been a smaller number of things that the authors had to conclude and answer questions about.
Throughout the book I kept thinking that it would be great if they explored this more, or went down this avenue of the story, or if we learned more about this. But there just was too much going on for that.
BUT! Dear Haiti, Love Alaine was still an incredibly entertaining, emotional, and engaging story! A large part of that is due to Alaine, our main character, for being so funny and idiosyncratic (but not in a forced way). She also felt like a really convincing and genuine teenager. You wouldn't think that would be a lot to ask from YA books, but it really is. Alaine talked and acted like a teenager, and she was really what tied all of the disparate plotlines together and made Dear Haiti, Love Alaine so good.
so bottom line: there's A LOT going on in this book, but there's lots of really interesting storylines that are exciting and fun, with a great main character.
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