Danticat tells a story similar to her own, but set about twenty years later and with plenty of other elements to differentiate it from a fictionalized memoir, about a Haitian girl, Celiane, moving to the US and reuniting her family.
I'm not usually one for literary analysis, but the layers of meaning are closer to the surface/more accessible to me than in most YA fiction, but not in a pedantic way. The narrator's best friend, left behind in Haiti's story shows us that Danticat thinks carefully about how her/Celiane's lives could have been different.
I found this quote poignant:
Tante Rose is staring so hard she hardly blinks. Perhaps she is remembering what it was like to look up at this same sky when she was a girl. If I ever come back here as a woman, maybe I will look at the sky in the same way.
I imagine Danticat identifying with Celiane, Tante Rose, and her distance from her native land when she wrote this. Do you think profound thoughts while looking at the sky, too?