Hiram Walker is a character who will stay with me for a very long time.
Coates creates a sense of family, memory, and freedom in a brand new way.

Coates’ coming-of-age novel is centered on a young man whose father is his master and who’s been tasked with caring for his own wastrelhalf-brother. The complications of this situation and Hiram’s growth as he finds himself involved with the Underground make for compelling reading. The messages are laid on thickly, but the action carries the reader through the book.

The Water Dancer

Virginia, tobacco fields who once enriched the masters and brought on the slave trade, see their land striped to sand, their mansions crumbling.
Slaves are sold, families separated, children sold from their mothers, all send Natchez - way, Tennessee, Missouri, where masters with lucrative land are in need of Taskers...slaves.

A line

I heard stories of white men who bought colored men to enact their wildest pleasures - white men who kept them locked away for the sheer thrill of being able to.

About

Hiram, a child without a mother he can remember, a child, a slave who's father is the master. We will travel many ways with Hiram on his road to find his mother, on his road to find freedom for many. I spend 4 days with Hi as he calls himself and found myself missing him.

A Fact

You will have to wait till the end to know what happened to Hiram's mother, well worth the wait.
I loved this novel based on facts, so well written...so many truth.
A must read

This novel, told in first person, is the story of a slave named Hiram, set in the late antebellum period in Virginia, where the tobacco plantation system is in decline and many slaves are being sold to go south to pick cotton. The story follows Hiram’s life first in slavery, then an attempted escape and re-capture, and a surprising liberation from capture into the “underground.” After joining the underground Hiram spends time in Philadelphia and after a year ends up back on his plantation as an organizer for the underground.
There are many different characters involved including his white father, his white step-brother, a woman who acts as a surrogate mother, another woman who acts as a companion, a southern white abolitionist, and the great emancipator, Harriet Tubman.
Slaves are called the “Tasked” and the masters are called the “Quality.” The predominant themes are freedom for slaves and the deep despair that is felt as families are broken up and sold down the “Natchez Trail” by their masters. There is violence and cruelty as well, but it is not particularly graphic, nor does it seem to among the author’s main concerns.
The author uses the term conduction in two different ways. In one sense it is the act of the underground helping slaves to escape to freedom in the North. In the second, and more important sense, it is the ancient art of teleportation that both Harriet Tubman and Hiram use to help slaves escape to freedom. In other words, it is fantastical.
If you are a reader like me, who is not a fan of fantasy, this novel may not satisfy you. The writing is good; the story is interesting. I’m not sure why someone as courageous as Harriet Tubman needs to have her bold history portrayed as fantasy.

I have never met Ta-Nehisi Coates though he was living in Paris at the same time I was. He was a fellow at the American Library in Paris and wrote 'Between Me and World' while there. That book went on to win the National Book award and changed his life. In his words, it was like being hit by a Mack truck.

I was sent an advance copy of 'We were Eight Years in Power', his 2017 book of eight articles previously written for the Atlantic during the Obama Presidency. I reviewed that book as highly as I could. I then went backwards and read his earlier books. I watched many videos of him on You Tube and always felt sad that I hadn't met him when he was here. I've come to like the man in the videos as much as the man who writes such articulate evocative essays. I have always been struck by his use of language, the elegant phrasing in his essays and his easy street vernacular when chatting away with an interviewer.

Now he has written a novel The Water Dancer, his first such book. He has adopted an almost mystical, mythical style of storytelling that, to me, is completely different than anything before. How does one write about something so heartbreaking as the treatment of slaves, the separation of families, of couple, the courage of so many people putting their lives on the line to rescue others from "the coffin" (slavery in the deep south), the life of Harriet Tubman and all the stolen moments, memories and stories of an entire race of people.

This is the story of Hiram Walker, born to a black mother whom he can't remember and a white plantation owner. Hi narrates his unexpected life from five years old when he thinks he lost his mother to his late twenties. When he has flashes of his other, it is of her dancing with her sister, Emily, feet pounding the floor, bodies bonelessly swaying without shame in complete abandon like the water dances in the river. Water is a character in this enthralling telling of a boy first just wanting to remember, then wanting to be free and then wanting to understand.

He lives his teenage years in his father's house underneath in the Warrens, he tries to escape, is captured and emprisoned. He makes in north and becomes part of the Underground railroad. As he works with the other dedicated members to free brothers and sisters, literally, family takes on a new meaning to him and drives him in ways he never could have conceived.

I don't pretend to even begin to know what it is like to be Black in America, what the word Freedom means to a man enslaved for real or by what we white people put on them, what it must be like to watch the US going backwards in this Age of White Supremacy. This elegantly written book that seems more dreamlike than factual has brought me as close to "understanding" to "feeling" the losses that never end as anything I've ever read.

My admiration for Ta-Nehisi Coates and his many forms of language continues to grow. This is a book, I will read again.

Beautifully written but a bit too slow moving at times. There are way too many characters, some of who were only mentioned briefly. I found myself becoming confused about who was who. In all a good read.

Coates’ first novel, and a hell of a way to open a fiction writing career. It’s a combination of a slave memoir, which means there’s a ton of monologues (and with some folks I know not liking Coates’ monologuing in his comics work, I do want to note that), and in general very true to the historical style. There’s also just a dash of magical realism, and historical figures who also are gifted with similar fantasy powers. Where this really dives deep is into the cruelty of slavery, especially in what was done to families. Definitely worth a read, just for the way that he writes it and the breadth and depth to which he goes in his writing.

This was not great. Too many characters; too much moving around. I was just skipping pages toward the end to get through it.

“They are both weaned on the religion of society, of slavery, which holds that for no particularly good reason one of them will live in the palace, while the other will be condemned to the dungeon.”

I really enjoyed the story of this book. However, I did feel like it moved very slowly. I felt myself skimming through some pages, but I found many phenomenal quotes and I did enjoy the book. Thank you for the opportunity to read!

A beautifully written totally absorbing novel,a novel of literary fiction of magic realism.This novel drew me in kept me turning the pages Avery special original novel.#netgalley#randomhouse,

This is a magical realism, narrative novel set in the waning years of Antebellum Virginia: when tobacco plantations were no longer fertile and rich slave-owners had to start selling off their property...humans, inanimate objects, and animals.

The protagonist is the slave son of the master. How Hiram is left without his mother on the plantation is not revealed until the very end of the story. Lots of things happen in between, including escapes, recapture, crossing paths with Harriet Tubman, secret identities and agendas revealed.

It was interesting reading this right after reading the ADC of "Stolen," which was about the Reverse Underground Railroad that snatched free blacks from the north and sold them into slavery in the south. I was honestly ambivalent when reading this story, until about two-thirds of the way through when I was ALL in and could hardly breathe.

Recommended for fans of fantastic historical fiction.

I was so excited when I learned that Ta-Nehisi Coates was writing a fiction book, and this did not disappoint. The writing and characters were so strong, and the world he built so fully described, that I didn’t even mind that the magical elements turned out to be more like metaphors than actual logical plot points.

This was a different sort of novel for me to read, but I enjoyed it. It was deep and highly moving. Both the storyline and characters were interesting and keep me hooked. I highly recommend!

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes beautifully — we know this much. Whether crafting a personal essay or a graphic novel adventure, Coates is a powerhouse.

The Water Dancer is an effective mingling of history, tragedy, reality, and mythic possibility. Coates crafts a character and universe that reflects concerns and questions about the planet we live on.

The best fiction causes us to respond to the painful truths that surround us. The Water Dancer is among the best of fiction.

I really wanted to like this, because I like Coates, but I found it too confusing. I didn't finish it.