The power of The Water Dancer lies in that reclamation, and it is a novel we need right now. The story of the master never wanted for narrators.” Coates has taken the story of slavery, the Underground Railroad, and the horrific oppression of black people at the hands of whites, and turned it into an allegory for what we are capable of when we own our own stories and memories. It reads, “My part has been to tell the story of the slave. The epigraph of the novel comes from Frederick Douglass. Who has tasked this group of human beings, and why? With what are they tasked? There is an element of philosophical questioning at the heart of the novel, as well as a supernatural and fantastical imagining of freedom on the terms of the “tasked” as opposed to those of the whites in power. Coates rarely uses the word “slave.” Instead, he refers to those enslaved as “the Tasked.” The choice is one that offers infinite possibilities for interpretation. In Coatess 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. Part novel of racial politics and part origin story, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel is a brilliant and magnificent work of pain, progress, and power. In the end, it is a novel interested in the psychological effects of slavery, a grief that Coates is especially adept at parsing. His ability to survive where Maynard perished is shrouded in a secret he doesn’t understand, a secret that will reveal that he is The Water Dancer. Hiram Walker, the black son of a slave owner and a woman enslaved, must navigate the world after losing his white brother, Maynard, in a carriage accident on the Goose River.
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