The MahoganyBooks & Very Smart Brothas book club is excited to announce our November book club read, The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates is an award-winning author of several books and journalist who once wrote for at The Atlantic on cultural and political issues regarding the African American community. His other fiction work included a comic series based on the Marvel superhero, Black Panther, first published in 2016. 

Told from the perspective of Hiram Walker, an enslaved man born in Elm County, VA, who eventually joins the Underground Railroad. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her--but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, the same power saves his life. This brush with death births and urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's every known.

"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

Open to the public, as well as, live streamed to Facebook, the MahoganyBooks + Very Smart Brothas book club is a monthly book club that reads a wide range of books written for, by, or about people of the African Diaspora then meets the first Friday of the following month to discuss and debate the book and its associated themes. Join the MahoganyBooks + Very Smart Brothas Book Club on December 6, 2019 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM for what promises to be a fun and engaging book discussion.

MY PICKDECEMBER 5, 2019