Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Hiram Walker is the son of an enslaved woman and her slave master, owner of a prominent Virginia estate. When Hiram is nearly killed in a drowning accident, he detects an amazing gift he cannot understand or harness. He travels between worlds, gone but not gone, and sees his mother, Rose, who was sold away when he was a child. Despite this astonishing vision, he cannot remember much about Rose. His power and his memory are major forces that propel Hiram into an adulthood filled with the hypocrisy of slavery, including the requisite playacting that flavors a stew of complex relationships. Struggling with his own longing for freedom, Hiram finds his affiliations tested with Thena, the taciturn old woman who took him in as a child; Sophia, a young woman fighting against her fate on the plantation; and Hiram's father who obliquely acknowledges him as a son. Throughout his courageous journey north and participation in the underground battle for liberation, Hiram struggles to match his gift with his mission. Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power, 2017) brings his considerable talent for racial and social analysis to his debut novel, which captures the brutality of slavery and explores the underlying truth that slaveholders could not dehumanize the enslaved without also dehumanizing themselves. Beautifully written, this is a deeply and soulfully imagined look at slavery and human aspirations.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling MacArthur fellow Coates has an avid following and his turn to fiction will bring in even more readers. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
The Water Dancer
Hiram was born into "tasking"—what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls slavery in this beautiful, wrenching novel—but he has always stood slightly apart from the other people who are "Tasked" on the Virginian estate called Lockless.
The son of an enslaved woman named Rose, Hiram learned early in life that his father was the Lockless master, Howell Walker. Although Hiram worked in the apple orchards and the main house, he had something the other Tasked would never dream of: lessons from the Walker family tutor. But the lessons were no gift. Howell Walker's plan was to prepare Hiram to spend his life caring for his older half-brother, Maynard, the charmless, dull heir to Lockless. A naturally smart child, Hiram subdued his thirst for knowledge. "I knew what happened to coloreds who were too curious about the world beyond Virginia," he says.
Driving Maynard home one night from the horse races, Hiram is thinking of nothing but his "desire for an escape from Maynard and the doom of his mastery. And then it came." Hiram doesn't know why a strange mist comes up off the river or why the bridge falls away, revealing his long-gone mother dancing.
He later learns this is Conduction, the rare ability to transport oneself on the power of memories. It's a prized skill that recruiters on the Underground Railroad hope Hiram will put to use for their cause. They move him to Philadelphia, where he is shocked to see for the first time people of all colors mingling freely. He works to harness his gift of Conduction, while still feeling the pull of his people who have been sold and scattered throughout the South.
The Water Dancer confronts our bitter history and its violence and ugliness, which still resonate generations later. Coates' fierce, thought-provoking essays on race composed We Were Eight Years in Power and the National Book Award winner Between the World and Me. Here he weaves a clear-eyed story that has elements of magic but is grounded in a profoundly simple truth: A person's humanity is tied to their freedom.
"Breathing," Hiram says. "I just dream of breathing."
Copyright 2019 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
The celebrated author of Between the World and Me (2015) and We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) merges magic, adventure, and antebellum intrigue in his first novel. In pre-Civil War Virginia, people who are white, whatever their degree of refinement, are considered "the Quality" while those who are black, whatever their degree of dignity, are regarded as "the Tasked." Whether such euphemisms for slavery actually existed in the 19th century, they are evocatively deployed in this account of the Underground Railroad and one of its conductors: Hiram Walker, one of the Tasked who's barely out of his teens when he's recruited to help guide escapees from bondage in the South to freedom in the North. "Conduction" has more than one meaning for Hiram. It's also the name for a mysterious force that transports certain gifted individuals from one place to another by way of a blue light that lifts and carries them along or across bodies of water. Hiram knows he has this gift after it saves him from drowning in a carriage mishap that kills his master's oafish son (who's Hiram's biological brother). Whatever the source of this power, it galvanizes Hiram to leave behind not only his chains, but also the two Tasked people he loves most: Thena, a truculent older woman who practically raised him as a surrogate mother, and Sophia, a vivacious young friend from childhood whose attempt to accompany Hiram on his escape is thwarted practically at the start when they're caught and jailed by slave catchers. Hiram directly confronts the most pernicious abuses of slavery before he is once again conducted away from danger and into sanctuary with the Underground, whose members convey him to the freer, if funkier environs of Philadelphia, where he continues to test his power and prepare to return to Virginia to emancipate the women he left behind—and to confront the mysteries of his past. Coates' imaginative spin on the Underground Railroad's history is as audacious as Colson Whitehead's, if less intensely realized. Coates' narrative flourishes and magic-powered protagonist are reminiscent of his work on Marvel's Black Panther super h ero comic book, but even his most melodramatic effects are deepened by historical facts and contemporary urgency. An almost-but-not-quite-great slavery novel. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
MacArthur Fellow Coates, author of the National Book Award-winning
Library Journal Reviews
DEBUT This ambitious fiction debut by social critic Coates (
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Coates (