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The Water Dancer: A Novel Hardcover – September 24, 2019

by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Author)

4.5 22,755 ratings

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.

“This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.”—San Francisco Chronicle

IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, directed by Nia DaCosta, and produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films

NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • Vanity Fair • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • Paste • Town & Country • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.

This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer isa propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.

Praise for The Water Dancer

“Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations—and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy.”—Rolling Stone

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I was young and love to me was a fuse that was lit, not a garden that was grown.
Highlighted by 3,386 Kindle readers
There is always a part of us that does not want to win, wants to stay down in the low and familiar.
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She’d gone from that warm quilt of memory to the cold library of fact.
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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of September 2019: Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of one of the most important nonfiction books of this decade, Between the World and Me, which means that his fiction debut arrives with a great amount of anticipation. Would the urgency of his nonfiction writing come through in a novel? Would he be as nimble in a made-up world? Would it be good? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding yes. Coates’s novel is the story of Hiram Walker, who was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation that is owned by his white father and experiencing a slow decline. Although Hiram is gifted with a photographic memory, his mother—who was sold away when he was young—is the one thing he cannot remember. Indeed, many of the women in his life are taken away from him too early—a fact that will guide his actions later in the novel. The story blends the brutality of history with more imaginative elements: for example, white people are called the Quality, black people are called the Tasked; and Hiram possesses powers that fall into the spectrum of magical realism. As the novel moves north to Philadelphia, where Hiram grows into his own and begins working for the Underground, and eventually turns back to his southern birthplace, the fantastical elements only give greater power to the story. The Water Dancer is a stirring debut, and Coates is the novelist we were hoping he would be. --Chris Schluep

Review

“Nearly every paragraph is laced through with dense, gorgeously evocative descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid vocabulary.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Coates balances the horrors of slavery against the fantastical. He extends the idea of the gifts of the disenfranchised to include a kind of superpower. But The Water Dancer is very much its own book, and its gestures toward otherworldliness remain grounded. In the end, it is a novel interested in the psychological effects of slavery, a grief that Coates is especially adept at parsing. . . . In Coates’s world, an embrace can be a revelation, rare and astonishing.”—Esi Edugyan, The New York Times Book Review

“The most surprising thing about The Water Dancer may be its unambiguous narrative ambition. This isn’t a typical first novel. . . . The Water Dancer is a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. . . . It is flecked with forms of wonder-working that push at the boundaries of what we still seem to be calling magical realism.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“While neither polemical nor wholly fantastical, the story draws on skills [Coates] developed in those other genres. . . . The story’s bracing realism is periodically overcome by the mist of fantasy. The result is a budding superhero discovering the dimensions of his power within the confines of a historical novel that critiques the function of racial oppression. . . . Coates isn’t dropping supernatural garnish onto The Water Dancer any more than Toni Morrison sends a ghost whooshing through Beloved for cheap thrills. Instead, Coates’s fantastical elements are deeply integral to his novel, a way of representing something larger and more profound than the confines of realism could contain.”—The Washington Post

“Mythic language pervades the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates. . . . With The Water Dancer . . . we pay witness to a writer unchained . . . a writer finally able to marry novelistic tendencies to the form. . . . The fistfuls of firmament Coates is able to bring back to us are a wonder to behold. . . . The horrors depicted never felt rote or part of any genre rulebook. In highlighting families, Coates made his characters individuals. . . . Elements of the adventure novel, of the heist novel, of the romance are all there. But Coates expertly subverts the expectations each of those labels carries. . . . The book does not lack for scene-stealers. . . . Who is he talking to when he demands remembering? He’s talking to us. All of us.”—Tochi Onyebuchi, Tordotcom

“Studied and meticulous, the novel is a slave narrative that depicts the quotidian horrors of family separation. Even so, it’s remarkably tender: The Water Dancer is also a romance.”—The Atlantic

“An experience in taking [Toni] Morrison’s ‘chances for liberation’ literally: What if memory had the power to transport enslaved people to freedom?’ . . . The most moving part of The Water Dancer [is] the possibility it offers of an alternate history. . . . The book’s most poignant and painful gift is the temporary fantasy that all the people who leaped off slave ships and into the Atlantic were not drowning themselves in terror and anguish, but going home.”—NPR

“An electrifying, inventive novel . . . [Coates] loses none of his mastery for conveying complex ideas and blending a deep knowledge of American history with scintillating wordsmanship. . . . His craft shows on every page. He gives this story—and these men and women—the care and space they demand and deserve. . . . A haunting adventure story told through the tough lens of history, The Water Dancer is a quintessentially American story of self-creation, doubt, and elevation.”—The Boston Globe

“The best writers—the best storytellers, in particular—possess the enchanting, irresistible power to take the reader somewhere else. Ta-Nehisi Coates imagines the furthest reach of that power as a means to transcend borders and bondage in The Water Dancer, a spellbinding look at the impact of slavery that uses meticulously researched history and hard-won magic to further illuminate this country’s original sin. . . . Exploring the loaded issues of race and slavery has become yet more fuel for today’s culture wars, but an underlying message of liberation through the embrace of history forms the true subject of The Water Dancer. . . . Coates envisions the transcendent potential in acknowledging and retelling stories of trauma from the past as a means out of darkness. With recent family separations at the U.S. border, this message feels all the more timely.”—Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Coates lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

And I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life, and though there were other bridges spanning the river Goose, they would have bound her and brought her across this one, because this was the bridge that fed into the turnpike that twisted its way through the green hills and down the valley before bending in one direction, and that direction was south.

I had always avoided that bridge, for it was stained with the remembrance of the mothers, uncles, and cousins gone Natchez-way. But knowing now the awesome power of memory, how it can open a blue door from one world to another, how it can move us from mountains to meadows, from green woods to fields caked in snow, knowing now that memory can fold the land like cloth, and knowing, too, how I had pushed my memory of her into the “down there” of my mind, how I forgot, but did not forget, I know now that this story, this Conduction, had to begin there on that fantastic bridge between the land of the living and the land of the lost.

And she was patting juba on the bridge, an earthen jar on her head, a great mist rising from the river below nipping at her bare heels, which pounded the cobblestones, causing her necklace of shells to shake. The earthen jar did not move; it seemed almost a part of her, so that no matter her high knees, no matter her dips and bends, her splaying arms, the jar stayed fixed on her head like a crown. And seeing this incredible feat, I knew that the woman patting juba, wreathed in ghostly blue, was my mother.

No one else saw her—not Maynard, who was then in the back of the new Millennium chaise, not the fancy girl who held him rapt with her wiles, and, most strange, not the horse, though I had been told that horses had a nose for things that stray out from other worlds and stumble into ours. No, only I saw her from the driver’s seat of the chaise, and she was just as they’d described her, just as they’d said she’d been in the olden days when she would leap into a circle of all my people—Aunt Emma, Young P, Honas, and Uncle John—and they would clap, pound their chests, and slap their knees, urging her on in double time, and she would stomp the dirt floor hard, as if crushing a crawling thing under her heel, and bend at the hips and bow, then twist and wind her bent knees in union with her hands, the earthen jar still on her head. My mother was the best dancer at Lockless, that is what they told me, and I remembered this because she’d gifted me with none of it, but more I remembered because it was dancing that brought her to the attention of my father, and thus had brought me to be. And more than that, I remembered because I remembered everything—everything, it seemed, except her.

It was autumn, now, the season when the races came south. That afternoon Maynard had scored on a long-shot thoroughbred, and thought this might, at last, win the esteem of Virginia Quality he sought. But when he made the circuit around the great town square, leaning back, way back in the chaise and grinning large, the men of society turned their back to him and puffed on their cigars. There were no salutes. He was what he would always be—Maynard the Goof, Maynard the Lame, Maynard the Fool, the rotten apple who’d fallen many miles from the tree. He fumed and had me drive to the old house at the edge of our town, Starfall, where he purchased himself a night with a fancy, and had the bright notion to bring her back to the big house at Lockless, and, most fatefully, in a sudden bout of shame, insisted on leaving the back way out of town, down Dumb Silk Road, until it connected to that old turnpike, which led us back to the bank of the river Goose.

A cold steady rain fell as I drove, the water dripping down from the brim of my hat, puddling on my trousers. I could hear Maynard in the back, with all his games, putting his carnal boasts upon the fancy. I was pushing the horse as hard as I could, because all I wanted was to be home and free of Maynard’s voice, though I could never, in this life, be free of him. Maynard who held my chain. Maynard, my brother who was made my master. And I was trying all I could to not hear, searching for distraction—memories of corn-shucking or young games of blind man’s bluff. What I remember is how those distractions never came, but instead there was a sudden silence, erasing not just Maynard’s voice, but all the small sounds of the world around. And now, peering into the pigeonhole of my mind, what I found were remembrances of the lost—men holding strong on watch-night, and women taking their last tour of the apple orchards, spinsters remanding their own gardens to others, old codgers cursing the great house of Lockless. Legions of the lost, brought across that baleful bridge, legions embodied in my dancing mother.

I yanked at the reins but it was too late. We barreled right through and what happened next shook forever my sense of a cosmic order. But I was there and saw it happen, and have since seen a great many things that expose the ends of our knowledge and how much more lies beyond it.

The road beneath the wheels disappeared, and the whole of the bridge fell away, and for a moment I felt myself floating on, or maybe in, the blue light. And it was warm there, and I remember that brief warmth because just as suddenly as I floated out, I was in the water, under the water, and even as I tell you this now, I feel myself back there again, in the icy bite of that river Goose, the water rushing into me, and that particular burning agony that comes only to the drowning.

There is no sensation like drowning, because the feeling is not merely the agony, but a bewilderment at so alien a circumstance. The mind believes that there should be air, since there is always air to be had, and the urge to breathe is such a matter of instinct that it requires a kind of focus to belay the order. Had I leapt from the bridge myself, I could have accounted for my new situation. Had I even fallen over the side, I would have understood, if only because this would have been imaginable. But it was as though I had been shoved out of a window right into the depths of the river. There was no warning. I kept trying to breathe. I remember crying out for breath and more I remember the agony of the answer, the agony of water rushing into me, and how I answered that agony by heaving, which only invited more water.

But somehow I steadied my thoughts, somehow I came to understand that all my thrashing could only but hasten my demise. And with that accomplished, I noted that there was light in one direction and darkness in another and deduced that the dark was the depths and the light was not. I whipped my legs behind me, and stretched out my arms toward the light, pulling the water until, at last, coughing, retching, I surfaced.

And when I came up, breaking through dark water, and into the diorama of the world—storm clouds hung by unseen thread, a red sun pinned low against them, and beneath that sun, hills dusted with grass—I looked back at the stone bridge, which must have been, my God, a half mile away.

The bridge seemed to be almost racing away from me, because the current pulled me along and when I angled myself to swim toward the shore it was that current still, or perhaps some unseen eddy beneath, pulling me downriver. There was no sign of the woman whose time Maynard had so thoughtlessly purchased. But whatever thoughts I had on her behalf were broken by Maynard making himself known, as he had so often, with hue and cry, determined to go out of this world in the selfsame manner that he’d passed through it. He was close by, pulled by the same current. He thrashed in the waves, yelled, treaded a bit, and then disappeared under, only to reappear again seconds later, yelling, half treading, thrashing.

“Help me, Hi!”

There I was, my own life dangling over the black pit, and now being called to save another. I had, on many occasions, tried to teach Maynard to swim, and he took to this instruction as he took to all instruction, careless and remiss at the labor, then sore and bigoted when this negligence bore no fruit. I can now say that slavery murdered him, that slavery made a child of him, and now, dropped into a world where slavery held no sway, Maynard was dead the minute he touched water. I had always been his protection. It was I, only by good humor, and debasement, that had kept Charles Lee from shooting him; and it was I, with special appeal to our father, who’d kept him countless times from wrath; and it was I who clothed him every morning; and I who put him to bed every night; and it was I who now was tired, in both body and soul; and it was I, out there, wrestling against the pull of the current, against the fantastic events that had deposited me there, and now wrestling with the demand that I, once again, save another, when I could not even conjure the energy to save myself.

“Help me!” he yelled again, and then he cried out, “Please!” He said it like the child he always was, begging. And I noted, however uncharitably, even there in the Goose facing my own death, that I had never before recalled him speaking in a manner that reflected the true nature of our positions.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ One World; First Edition (September 24, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0399590595
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0399590597
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.45 x 1.3 x 9.55 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #113,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #81 in Black & African American Fantasy Fiction (Books)
- #201 in Black & African American Historical Fiction (Books)
- #1,147 in Historical Fantasy (Books)

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story “The Case for Reparations.” He lives in New York with his wife and son.

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Tigerlily64

Slavery. Escape to Freedom. Beautiful Poetic Prose. Magical.

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2020

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is well known for his nonfiction works. I read and very much enjoyed Between the World and Me, which I reviewed on Amazon in 2016. He has also written his memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, and another nonfiction work, Eight Years in Power. Coates’ comic book endeavors are less well known. I recently found out that he has worked on a Black Panther comic book for Marvel Comics.

The Water Dancer is a New York Times best seller and was number one in the Hardcover Fiction and the Print and E-book Fiction categories when it was first published in September 2019. Oprah Winfrey selected it for her Oprah’s Book Club on Apple TV. According to Wikipedia, Oprah has said that The Water Dancer is one of the best 5 books she has ever read. I was excited to find out that Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt are now producing a film version of The Water Dancer.

Originally, I listened to The Water Dancer on Audible. Sometimes a poor narrator can ruin a book, but this was definitely not the case here. Joe Morton is an exceptional narrator. I was so captivated by the story and the skillful and powerful narration that I ended up buying both the Kindle version and the hardback. The hardback is to keep and treasure, for this is a book that I would cherish and hand down to my children and grandchildren.

The Water Dance is historical fiction with a strong mystical and magical thread. It is the story of the enslavement of a people and the struggle for freedom from the yoke of slavery. The main protagonist is Hiram Walker, who was born into slavery on the Lockless plantation in Virginia. When he was 9 years old, his mother was sold, and he was so devastated that he lost all memory of her. Although his mother was a slave, he knew he was the son of the plantation owner, Nathaniel Walker. When his father invites him to the main house to work as a servant instead of leaving him to toil in the fields, he is at first delighted. He pictures a bright future. However, that future is not realistic and is certainly not the future Hiram envisioned. He is still a slave and has to serve the whites’ agenda. He is one of the Tasked, not one of the Quality, who are all white.

Note that Ta-Nehisi Coates uses the terms ‘Tasked’ and 'Quality' instead of ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’. What is revealing here is that the 'Slave' is dependent on his 'Master'. On the other hand, the 'Quality' are dependent on the 'Tasked' (slaves). Coates maintains that the 'Tasked' support the 'Quality', for the Tasked do the work and keep the plantation operating smoothly. The 'Quality' are dependent on the 'Tasked' to take care of them and are pretty much helpless without them.

Hiram is called to entertain the Quality at parties, for he is exceptionally bright and is gifted with a photographic memory. His gifts make him a hit with the card playing whites. He is the boy wonder, but he is also a slave and is taught to know his place. As one of the Tasked, he has been told to watch over the all-White Maynard, his irresponsible, degenerate half-brother. Maynard frequently commands Hiram to take him to town to drink and visit prostitutes. On the drive home one dark night, the carriage overturns and throws Hiram and Maynard into the Goose River. Hiram is struggling in the water, when he hears Maynard call out for help. Maynard had never had the discipline to learn to swim, although Hiram had tried hard to teach him. The night of this carriage accident Maynard disappears under the water and is pulled away by the current. Hiram is unable to save him. As Hiram sinks into the deep water and fights for his life, he sees a blue light and images of what he thinks must be his mother dancing in the water with a jar upon her head. Miraculously, he soon finds himself onshore and safe. This is Hiram’s first experience with the power of conduction.

Now what is conduction? It is a tapping of energy with a strong memory of place or person, an intention to transport oneself or others to another physical place. We all have had times when we dream of being in another place. We can visualize it vividly. In our dreams and sometimes even when we are awake, our yearnings take us there in our imagination. Ta-Nehisi Coates takes this a step further to a surrealistic traveling to another physical location. It is a journey that takes very little time at all, but requires a tremendous outpouring of energy from the conductor. In The Water Dance, there is always a blue light that appears and the presence of water for conduction to occur. All of this is surreal, of course, but Ta-Nehisi Coates uses this power of conduction effectively for his story. When Hiram remembers his mother vividly, when he deepens his memory of time and place, his powers of conduction increase, and he uses this power to transport slaves to freedom. Hiram partners at times with the master of conduction, Harriet Tubman. He works for the Underground Railroad and the freedom of his people.

There are many 4 star reviews out there. However, without a moment’s hesitation, I gave this book a 5 star rating. I have read criticisms of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ so-called narrative gaps that lead to confusion for the reader. Have we forgotten that many of our contemporary well-respected and often prize-winning authors go back and forth in time to follow the protagonist’s memories of events? Yes, many other authors do this, and certainly Ta-Nehisi Coates uses the power of memory as a strong theme. There are also those reviewers who object to the surrealistic aspect of the book. Some even say the less magical parts deserve the most attention. These people are only concerned with the narrative (who did what etc.) I believe they are missing what makes this novel so magnificent. Much of the writing is really poetry in prose form. Poetry takes us beyond the words to heights of emotion that touch our souls. Ta-Nehisi Coates achieves this depth in his novel. The Water Dancer is incredibly powerful and evocative; it is heartbreaking and gorgeous.

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amanda sidders

Amazing work

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2024

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The author had amazing storytelling skills, vibrant and realistic imagery- amazing wordsmith- story compelling interesting and worth every minute

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C.P.M.

A Beautiful Story of Resilience and Resistance

Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2021

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the preeminent voices on race in America today having explored the topic through essays for “The Atlantic” Andy is two nonfiction books “The Beautiful Struggle” and “Between the World and Me.” But in his debut novel, Mr. Coates shows that he is just as capable of writing fiction as he is at writing fiction.

Set in Antebellum Virginia, this book follows Hiram Walker, the son of a slave and a slave-master or a Tasked and a Quality as Mr. Coates calls them. Through freak accident, Hiram learns that he has a power known as Conduction that, if he can control it, could help bring himself and many other Tasked people to freedom. Soon he finds himself involved in the Underground, a secret resistance movement to slavery, that wants to help him control his power, but also use him for their own purposes. To say more would be to give away too much. Suffice it to say, it is a great story with a great ending that feels earned and almost perfect.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s style does take some time getting used to. The pace can be slow at the beginning and even a bit confusing. I honestly didn’t know what exactly had happened to Hiram in the first chapters that made him and others aware of his powers. That said, once you get used to the style and if you pay careful attention, this book is just as beautifully written as any one of Mr. Coates’s essays or memoirs.

Overall, this is a fabulous book. Mr. Coates style may take a little getting used to, but the payoff is worth it. I highly recommend this novel to fans of books such as Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” and similar stories.

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Beth G

This story will transport you

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2024

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I knew very little about the Underground Railroad before reading this stunning book. It helps you not only to grasp what slavery was, but also to feel it. It’s a painful story full of beauty.

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Camille V Pedone

compellingly good reading

Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2024

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The story brings the true depth of the fractured family suffering inflicted by the cruel capitalist captivity of a stolen yet resilient resolute people.

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Sasha Cooper-Morrison

Great historical sci-fi recount of this era

Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2024

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I’m a big fan of Ta-Nehisisi Coates and this book did not disappoint. I loved how this story offered a futuristic take on a set of events related to the Underground Railroad during the times of slavery in the US. It was refreshing to have darker aspects of the time (abuse and other violence) recounted in a less graphic, less traumatic way without losing the meaning and poignancy.

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Helga

A story of hope

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 28, 2022

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Wonderful descriptions of the evil and ignorance which enabled slavery. But now we must also learn the lessons of how monoculture kills the land. We must go back to a system of companion planting and crop rotation. Some people knew even then, but have we learned anything?
The story also tells of the amazing Harriet Gunman and the Growth of the underground resistance to slavery

sylvie dandonneau

The water dancer

Reviewed in Canada on July 1, 2020

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Je l'ai acheté pour l'offrir à mon mari. Il avait lu un résumé dans un journal (The Record) de Sherbrooke et m'avait dit qu'il aimerait bien lire ce livre. Il adore ce livre alors, je suis très satisfaite de mon achat. Surtout que la livraison s'est faite plus rapidement que mentionné. Merci beaucoup.

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Cliente de Amazon

Repetitivo

Reviewed in Mexico on January 3, 2020

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Me gusto, que llego muy rápido por Amazon Prime. No me gusto el desarrollo del libro, con un lenguaje racial.

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arrowboy

Einfach fantastisch

Reviewed in Germany on August 26, 2020

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Was auf den ersten Blick wie ein reiner Roman über die amerikanische Sklavenhalter-Zeit, erzählt aus der Sicht eines der Sklaven, wirkt, entpuppt sich bei näherem Hinsehen als viel mehr. Ja, es geht um das Halten von Sklaven. Aber es geht auch im die psychologische Seite aller Betroffenen, um Kulturen, die nebeneinander her leben und sich kaum zu berühren scheinen, obwohl sie eng aneinandergekettet sind - und um die Macht der Erinnerung, die Magie des Storytellings, des Tanzens und Singens und um den Umgang mit Schuld.

Alles ist eingepackt in einen wunderbar deutlichen und dennoch poetischen Stil. Grandios.

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V

A fantastic journey

Reviewed in India on August 16, 2020

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The books slows down once in a while but it gives a sneak peak of a another world and another time.

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