Sometimes stories are better one at a time rather than in a collection

The last story in Edwige Danticat's "The Dew Breaker" (title story) puts together all (I think) of the pieces, connects the proverbial dots pulling together the 10 or so stories in the collection into a kind of novel. We see in this last story the particulars of the crime and prisoner abuse alluded to in the first story - the sweet and beloved Hatian-American father in the first story is now seen as the thuggish and abusive Haitian police officer who had to flee the country for his life and establish a new identity in the U.S. Most of the other stories in the collection (not all) examine the various tendrils of this single event - people seeking out the abusive officer for revenge, his family trying to cope with the mystery, and so on. I will have to look back to make all of the connections. It's a book of crime & punishment, in a way, but also a book about exile and generational curses and political oppression and the relation between first and 3rd world countries - lots of themes in a relatively short collection. I admire all the stories but am not, unfortunately, deeply moved by this collection, either - there's something a little cold and withdrawn about it, the chilliness of constructing a narrative out of pieces and fragments makes none of the stories feel complete or fully engaged. It's as if Danticat is feeling her way toward a more profound and integrated work of fiction, a novel (which probably was the more powerful Farming of Bones). It's a book with a lot of material but the tone is somewhat tentative and the material seems undigested and unintegrated - oddly, the stories are better (some of them) one at a time rather than collected.