![]() ![]() “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. This isn’t a typical first novel, if by “typical first novel” we mean a minor-chord and semi-autobiographical nibbling expedition around the margins of a life. The most surprising thing about “The Water Dancer” may be its unambiguous narrative ambition. When word leaked that he was writing a novel, one had to wonder: What would that be like? With his left hand, Coates also writes comic books, including a Black Panther series for Marvel. In his three books of nonfiction - “The Beautiful Struggle,” “Between the World and Me” and “We Were Eight Years in Power” - he seemed to be almost single-handedly waking the consciousness of his country. Over the past decade, Ta-Nehisi Coates has emerged as an important public intellectual and perhaps America’s most incisive thinker about race. ![]()
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