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Her initial concern is for her baby and her husband, assuming that she will be held relatively unscathed and eventually returned to her family. The small family is heading out for a day at the beach when Miri is snatched from their car and held for a million dollar ransom. Mireille, her husband Michael, and their baby Christophe have come to Haiti to visit Miri's extraordinarily wealthy parents. It is powerful and affecting and impressive.
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It is difficult to read, jarring in the force of terrible happenings, and devastating in consequences but it is not a glorification or whitewashing of torture or poverty, nor of either America or Haiti. But do you still skip the book if it also tackles important issues of classism and inequity, entitlement and the social divide, and the reality of life in modern day Haiti? All of this is very much what you find between the covers of Roxane Gay's debut novel, An Untamed State. And when you add in the fact that there is terrible violence, repeated rape, kidnapping, and PTSD too, well, you'd be forgiven for giving the book a wide berth indeed. When you use adjectives like this to describe a book, it can be hard to convince people to read it.