Publisher: Simon and Schuster, January 11, 2022

Format: Paperback

Pages: 272

Rating: 5/5 stars

Synopsis (from Goodreads):

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.

They call themselves the Stolen. Their owners call them captives. They are taught their captors’ tongues and their beliefs but they have a language and rituals all their own.

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. 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. 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.

It hurts the reserved and stubborn William, who finds himself falling for Margaret, a small but mighty woman with self-possession beyond her years. And it hurts Cato, whose first love, Iris, was sold off with no forewarning. 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. There is also Pandora, with thick braids and long limbs, whose beauty calls to him.

Their relationships begin to fray when a visiting minister with a mysterious past starts to fill their heads with ideas about independence. 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. Do they follow the preacher and pursue the unknown? Confined in a landscape marked by deceit and uncertainty, who can they trust?

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? 

My Review:

Thank you Simon and Schuster for the copy of this book.
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Read if you like: books like the Yellow Wife.
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This book looks at a set of characters forced to toil on a plantation in the American South. The book goes back and forth between different perspectives, but mainly focuses on William and Cato and their experiences before living on the current plantation and the development of their relationship on the same plantation. I really loved reading about the complicated nature of their relationship.
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Best part of the book was the theme around the importance of words. Words are bestowed upon children when they are born and these seven words they carry into adulthood. Not only are these seven words important, but the book looked at the importance and complexity of language, which was a great connection.
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CW: violence, gore, torture, murder, assault (physical and sexual), enslavement, loss of a loved one, racism and sexism.