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.
“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
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