Mitya finds himself facing a different sort of ambiguity: is he a boy, as everyone keeps telling him, or is he not quite a boy, as he often feels?Īfter suffering horrific abuse from his cousin Vovka who has returned broken from war, Mitya embarks on a journey across underground Moscow to find something better, a place to belong. As he grows, his life mirrors the uncertain future of his country, which is attempting to rebuild itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union, torn between its past and the promise of modern freedom. For Mitya, it is a small, metal treasure that guides him from within. For his family, it marks the beginning of the end, the promise of certain death. When Mitya was two years old, he swallowed his grandmother’s sewing needle. In an elegant work of monumental imagination that will reorient how we think of the legacy of America’s shameful past, Jabari Asim presents a beautiful, powerful, and elegiac novel that examines intimacy and longing in the quarters while asking a vital question: What would happen if an enslaved person risked everything for love?

Do they follow the preacher and pursue the unknown? Confined in a landscape marked by deceit and uncertainty, who can they trust? He tells them that with freedom comes the right to choose the small things-when to dine, when to begin and end work-as well as the big things, such as whom and how to love.

Their relationships begin to fray when a visiting minister with a mysterious past starts to fill their heads with ideas about independence. There is also Pandora, with thick braids and long limbs, whose beauty calls to him. He now finds solace in his hearty band of friends, including William, who is like a brother Margaret Little Zander and Milton, a gifted artist. And it hurts Cato, whose first love, Iris, was sold off with no forewarning. It hurts the reserved and stubborn William, who finds himself falling for Margaret, a small but mighty woman with self-possession beyond her years.

It’s that cruel practice-the wanton destruction of love, the belief that Black people aren’t even capable of loving-that hurts the most. Subject to the whims of their tyrannical and eccentric captor, Cannonball Greene, they never know what harm may befall them: inhumane physical toil in the plantation’s quarry by day, a beating by night, or the sale of a loved one at any moment. In a world that would be allegorical if it weren’t saturated in harsh truths, Cato and William meet at Placid Hall, a plantation in an unspecified part of the American South. They are taught their captors’ tongues and their beliefs but they have a language and rituals all their own. The Water Dancer meets The Prophets in this spare, gripping, and beautifully rendered novel exploring love and friendship among a group of enslaved Black strivers in the mid-19th century.

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