Reading, for me, is entertainment and an escape from the real world. But it can also inform and stretch the boundaries of the life I live.
This book is about purity culture and the sexual abuse and dysfunction that are embedded within it, within the context of a Haitian family. It explores how it damages these women and yet they continue to perpetuate it, but if the book attempts to explain why they knowingly inflict it on the next generation, I failed to understand it.
This is the third book I’ve read recently where a previously virginal character’s pregnancy results from a single sexual act, and the second where it was rape. I’m not sure that these types of storytelling devices aren’t themselves a perpetuation of purity culture.