For her sixteenth birthday, Damita De Salvado receives a beautiful slave girl, Rissa, but mistreats her, revealing Damita's prejudice and hardening Rissa's heart. When her family experiences financial hardships, Damita grudgingly sells Rissa to a mysterious Christian doctor, Jefferson Whitman, who is Rissa's adopted brother. Now the tables have turned: Rissa is a wealthy, free woman, while Damita's family struggles to keep the plantation. Will both women find the love and security they long for?
This is a collection of seven original fairy tales set in the Caribbean. They are " The True Blue Butterfly" , " The Caribs and the Birds" , " The Legend of the Water Lily" , " The Witch of Karteur Falls" , " A Red Star" , " Pouri Blossoms" and " Tales of the Immortelles" .
The Immortals is set in an infamous neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, on Grand-Rue, where many women, young and old, trade in flesh, sex, and desire. We learn, in glimpses and fragments, about the lives of women who fall in love with the moving images of television, the romance of a novel, and the dreams of escape. This moving novel asks, What becomes of these women, their lives, their stories, their desires, and their whims when a violent earthquake brings the capital city and its brothels to their knees? To preserve the memory of women she lived and worked with, the anonymous narrator makes a deal with her client once she discovers that he is a writer: sex in exchange for recording the stories of the friends who were buried beneath the rubble. She tells the stories of women who were friends, lovers, daughters, and mothers—all while their profession sought to hide any trace of intimacy or interiority through pseudonyms and artifice. Ultimately the book reveals how a group of women sought to make a name for themselves in life, demanding that they not be forgotten in death. Winner of France's 2012 Prix Thyde Monnier de la Société des Gens de Lettres, The Immortals is the first work of fiction by the celebrated Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel. Mingling poetry and prose, Orcel centers stories that too often go untold, while reflecting on the power and limits of storytelling in the face of catastrophe.
In this magical story of her childhood in a world so different from our own, Mireille Marokvia blurs the distinction between the real and the imagined to create a moving account of how a young woman gives voice to her vision and an aging woman addresses the gentle ghosts that haunt her memories. Immortelles is an elegy to a lost world and a testimony to the splendor of childhood -- even a childhood touched by death.
