A review by kwims
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

I don't know if this was intentional, but I really liked how Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote Hiram's father as being a "kind and generous" plantation owner, who didn't beat the people that he had enslaved on his plantation and would even go so far as to call Hiram his own son occasionally. I thought that that captured the deep evil of chattel slavery, even if a white man was "kind" to the people he enslaved, he still participated in the ownership of other people and that was still a deep kind of evil.
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