What Storm, What Thunder

Starred review from August 16, 2021
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti provides the backdrop for the extraordinary latest from Chancy (The Loneliness of Angels). “The earth had buckled and, in that movement, all that was not in its place fell upon the earth’s children, upon the blameless as well as the guilty, without discrimination,” remembers survivor Ma Lou, a market woman. Multilayered, lyrical, and told by 10 people affected by the disaster, all connected by blood or friendship, Chancy’s dazzling take considers a myriad of topics including sexual violence, racism, a dysfunctional government, and capitalism. There’s Ma Lou’s estranged, wealthy water executive son, Richard, who returns to Haiti on a business trip from Paris just before the earthquake, and drowns while having an anti-capitalist epiphany; Richard’s daughter, Anne, an architect working in Rwanda who returns to help after the quake; Taffia, 15, who lives for much of the year in a displaced persons camp, where she is raped and gets pregnant; and Didier, her brother, an undocumented cab driver in Boston who is often stiffed and sometimes beaten by his fares due to his skin color. Didier hears about the tragedy on NPR and wishes he could know if his family are safe while feeling guilty for pursuing his own life. There are many endings, with shifting fortunes and stories involving vodou, and it all coheres with a poignant mission involving Ma Lou and Anne four years after the earthquake. Each of the voices entrances, thanks to Chancy’s beautiful prose and rich themes. This is not to be missed.

September 1, 2021
The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti was global news because of the scale of the tragedy. In this remarkable novel, Chancy reminds us that the headlines and statistics were but part of the story of death and destruction. By giving voice to distinct individuals, Chancy creates, in each chapter, another layer of insight into this island community before and after. The story of Sara, Ma Lou, Sonia, Richard, Anne, and Olivier root the grief and trauma in lost loves and laughter; and they all add up to commentary on disaster management in a postcolonial world. Chancy draws us in with story lines that illuminate the social hierarchy of Port-au-Prince, glimpses of market life, and various neighborhood experiences, taking us through physical and emotional suffering to track generational loss in art, business, and developmental work. In her intricate tale of how the tragedy is multiplied by systemic social failures that follow the earthquake, Chancy examines the difficult question of how people move past grief of this magnitude, personally and collectively. Every element of the writing and characterization delivers a poignant experience.

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Starred review from September 24, 2021

On January 12, 2010, an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 people perished in Haiti's horrific earthquake. Here, Guyana Prize--winning Chancy (The Loneliness of Angels) uses precise, exquisite language and deftly interlinked stories to convey not simply a visceral understanding of what happened that day, of the suffering incurred and the mutual support given even as help from abroad stuttered, but a portrait of Haiti itself. There's heart-of-the-community market woman Ma Lou and young Jonas, who buys eggs from her and runs errands for Dieudonn�, business partner and companion to high-class sex worker Sonia; Jonas's mother, Sara, who lost him and her two little girls in the earthquake and is now visited by their ghosts; expatriate businessman Richard, cousin to Dieudonn� and neglectful son to Ma Lou; drug-running Trinidadian Leopold, also cousin to Dieudonn�; Sonia's siblings Taffia and Paul, who find their mother after the earthquake but whose troubles continue in one of the innumerable tent cities set up after the earthquake; and their older brother Didier, a Boston-based musician anguishing from afar while pondering the awful strictures of Black life in the United States. All are remarkable and remarkably drawn characters whose heartrending experiences convey what it's like "having to live in the after, always, remembering the before." VERDICT A highly recommended account of a terrible tragedy that also illuminates the deep interconnectedness of Haitian society.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2021
Survivors and victims tell their powerful, moving stories in this fictional account of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. On Jan. 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck the island of Hispaniola, changing the face of Haiti forever. Between 250,000 and 300,000 people are estimated to have perished, many of them in the crowded capital of Port-au-Prince, while 1.5 million others were left homeless. In her searing new novel, Chancy, who spent years talking to survivors, sifts through the wreckage of this inconceivable calamity. She has shaped the stories of the living and the dead into a mighty fictional tapestry that reflects the terror, despair, and sorrow of the moment as she examines questions of Haitian identity in a world that doesn't seem to care. Among her unforgettable characters are a desperate husband who abandons his grief-stricken wife in a sprawling, dangerous tent city; a sex worker who steps out of a hotel moments before it collapses; a drug trafficker trapped in an elevator who begins to reassess his life; a wealthy businessman who left Haiti and has returned to make a deal at the worst possible moment; a teenage girl terrorized by a former classmate in the refugee camp; a Haitian cab driver in Boston who has discovered religion and the perils of being Black in America; and an architect who returns home from Rwanda, where she'd been working for an NGO, only to find herself stymied by bureaucracy and unable to help anyone. The thread that connects these voices is Ma Lou, a market woman who has witnessed the tides of fortune in Port-au-Prince for decades and who holds no illusions about the future. The stories are not always easy to read, but they shouldn't be. Chancy offers fleeting redemption for some characters, but she does not deal in false hopes. "We all look away unless it's us, or someone we love, going up in flames," one character muses. In this devastating work, Chancy refuses to let any of us look away. A devastating, personal, and vital account.

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