Review: Dear Haiti, Love Alaine by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite
ARC provided by the publisher, all opinions my own. Also, clearly, I have taken way to long to read this as it has been out for almost a year.
Dear Haiti, Love Alaine follows Alaine, a Haitian-American high school student in Florida, as she finds herself dealing with being sent to Haiti as a punishment for being suspended from school. The book weaves Haiti’s history in with Alaine’s present, and once she is in Haiti, Alaine must cope with family secrets, the declining health of someone she loves, and perhaps breaking a family curse.
I have mixed feelings about this book; it has an abundance of strengths, which I will shortly enumerate, but also avoided the full exploration of topics it was so close to in a way that didn’t mesh with me very well.
Starting with the positives! The writing is wonderful, Maika and Maritza Moulite write together so seamlessly; the character voice is incredibly consistent throughout the book. I did like the humor of the book, Alaine is funny, assertive, and confident in a way that I found refreshing. I would undoubtedly have loved to be friends with Alaine in high school.
Speaking of high school, I was not super keen on the resolution of the plotline with Alaine’s school friend and other classmates. Mostly because it did not exist. The beginning of the book had almost no bearing on the rest of the book, except it was a launching pad to send Alaine to Haiti. I really just wanted a conversation with Alaine’s Florida best friend, something that resolved the way her friend was unsupportive in school initially or even just an exchange that showed her friend actively supporting Alaine and not just her being a vehicle for the audience to know the rumors going around back in Florida. Another nod to something I found enjoyable is I am also a Florida person, though neither Miami nor the rural bit mentioned in the book, and I really like reading books set in-part near me.
Part of my conflict over how to feel about the novel is it talks about so many important topics but stops just shy of actually diving super deeply into it. The book is slightly more lighthearted than I would have preferred. The authors repeatedly bring up the poverty of Haiti, and show the audience the tension between a country being reliant on international aid but also being stifled by it in other aspects. But I really wanted them to explore farther the privilege of Alaine’s family. All the exploration of her family’s position seemed rather surface level. There was mention of the sins of Alaine’s grandfather, and a passing conversation about the inherent problem with them having Roseline be a literal slave in their household in her childhood (and Roseline’s character resolution was kinda messed up, basically ‘her life as hard but she is vengeful, so I will just join the family ignorance of her’). I wanted more discussion here.
I was especially disappointed by the handling of Alaine’s aunt and the app, Patron Pal. When the app is first introduced, it is immediately followed with an excellent analysis of why this kind of charity work is problematic and inherently exploitive. But the narrative ends up just completely forgiving this because it makes the characters feel good to do it, even when the only person on the page that is a benefactor of this app talks about how he feels he is exploiting his children through it in order to be able to send one of them to school. And Alaine’s aunt was the literal head of a company that was founded as a money-laundering scheme and is presented as innocent and unaware of her own involvement in this. She does give information to the authorities or the press to expose this behavior, but I cannot believe that the head of the company could not be complicit in such an action. I was so disappointed that the end of the book had Alaine not seeing the flaws in this exploitation of children and that she wanted to salvage this shady company.
I really liked the character of Alaine, and she does learn a lesson and grow as a person by the end of the novel, but it really just happens right at the end of the novel. We are following her through her own grieving process as she tried desperately to break the curse on her family to rid her mother of early-onset Alzheimers. I will give a note that I really found this plotline to be handled delicately and truthfully (at least truthfully to my experience with family members with this disease), and I don’t have complaints at all about how this plotline ended. Being that the story is one of acceptance, once Alaine accepts her mother’s fate, the book just kind of has a three-page summary of what’s next for everyone and abruptly ends. It was abrupt and jarring. I wanted to see Alaine process these feelings a little bit more throughout the novel; it would have made my desire for more explanation at the end lessen.
I liked the way the story structured the magical realism elements—the introduction for people unaware of the literary convention, then the slow introduction of the family curse. I really really liked that the magical realism elements were not used to explain the sicknesses and death at the conclusion of the book (of the death’s in this book, I think the one that happens later in the book is also not addressed enough).
So those are my complicated feelings on this book. I really liked some elements, the character voice, historical elements, and the writing, and I was put off by the surface level discussion of some of these very important topics.
I would recommend this to anyone interested in stories of the Haitian diaspora, as well as most late middle schoolers/early high schoolers. The book’s voice is quite young in a way that I think would very much appeal! Not to say older folks should not pick it up as well, I am clearly out of that age bracket, and I did!
I gave this book three stars.
