Edwidge Danticat, illustrated by Alix Delinois,
Eight Days: A Story of Haiti
Orchard Books, 2010.
Ages 5-11
When a devastating earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, Haiti-born author Edwidge Danticat struggled to find a way to help her daughters make sense of it. In her Author’s Note at the end of the book, she explains that she wrote Eight Days: A Story of Haiti as a response to her five-year-old daughter’s concerns: “I carefully told her about a few people, among them some children, who had been miraculously rescued.” The result is this story of a young boy who is rescued after being trapped for eight days, during which hope, luck and his memories and imagination all play a part in his survival.
The story begins with the boy’s rescue – the accompanying illustration of an apparently international press pack gets the point across that his survival is newsworthy. The questions asked will resonate with young readers: “Were you afraid? Were you sad? Did you cry?” The boy’s response forms the framework of the story, as he relates one activity/memory for each day. This device is the perfect vehicle to show how he and his friend Oscar used the power of their imaginations to separate themselves from the reality of their situation: but it also allows the blur between imagination and reality to come through in the narrative. So, for example, they spend Day 5 playing soccer with their friends. “Oscar felt really tired and went to sleep. He never woke up. That was the day I cried.” Or again, on Day 6, he is in the countryside playing with his sister and getting “soaking wet and muddy”, catching “a mouthful of rain”…
Illustrator Alix Delinois, who was also born in Haiti, brings the boy’s imaginings to life. His palette of almost overpoweringly bright colours conveys the hyper-reality of his memories of what are, after all, very real people and events. This interplay between the boy’s imagination and his physical situation allows Eight Days to be absorbed and pondered by young children at just that age when awareness of the human cost of natural disaster is dawning; and it also makes it a good book to read with older children. This is a book for sharing. It will raise plenty of questions, as well as perhaps the need for reassurance, and some searching of young readers’ own imaginations.
Marjorie Coughlan
October 2011