Used Book – The Taste of Young Girls, Dany Laferrière

Haiti, 1968. A young teenager looks out the window of his family home. Across the street is Miki's house, always full of girls, lazy, mocking, occasionally prostitutes, "fresh girls," as he calls them. They burst with life amidst the prevailing misery. The dictator Duvalier is in power, the Tonton Macoutes prowl like sharks in the streets of Port-au-Prince. A dangerous weekend awaits our hero. Accompanied by a friend involved in a tragic incident, he takes refuge across the street. The story of an adolescent's journey to sensuality, "Le goût des jeunes filles" (The Taste of Young Girls) is also a Haitian chronicle. These insolent young girls, who fear nothing and live by their own rules, thus reveal, in stark contrast, the horror of the dictatorship. And it is they who, in the end, will give Fanfan a taste for love, poetry, and revolt. Even more than a coming-of-age novel, "Le goût des jeunes filles" is a novel of liberation.