So, this started off so good and then around the 30 percent mark started to flounder. Coates is a great writer, the story just drags. I started to get impatient while reading and then the story felt like it was stuck at a certain point. The ending is abrupt as well. 

"The Water Dancer" follows Hiram Walker. A son of a slave and the master of the house, Hiram dreams of being "Quality." Hiram also dreams of his father looking at him the way he looks at his half-brother Maynard. As Hiram gets older and is being groomed to take care of Maynard, a tragedy unfolds leaving Hiram realizing that he needs to get away and get freedom in the Underground. The book follows Hiram as he goes through trials and tribulations along with some magical realism thrown in. 

Hiram was an interesting character, but I started to grow bored with him towards the end of the book. The book flip flops around regarding freedom and the Underground and then weirdly sticks on a romance for the the last 40 percent of the book. I really wish we had gotten more of a glimpse into the character Sophia's mind.  

Not too much to say about other characters, they don't seem very developed. Hawkins and Corrine just talked like riddles and I got tired of reading their dialogue.

The writing at first evoked a lot of feelings in me, but once we get to Hiram's escape and then capture again the book just dragged from then on. Also the whole Underground that is described in this book made zero sense to me and I started to get irritated while reading.

Not too much to say here besides feeling disappointed. Maybe tighter editing could have helped smooth things out. 

This is an extraordinary book.

It’s a sobering, sometimes difficult read, eye-opening, and enlightening. I had to put it down on many occasions, being constantly reminded of how Obama’s presidency has been followed by Trump’s is depressing enough, but the central focus is on challenging the American racism (and how the current toxic presidency has exposed this malignant state). Coates openly wrestles with his own changing views on the first Black Presidency, and demonstrates how deeply engrained systemic and societal racism infects everything in this country, Obama or no Obama.

‘We Had Eight Years in Power’ is practically required reading.

Between the World and Me has been praised and criticized by many many reviewers, so I will limit myself to a couple of textual elements that struck me as odd.

Coates has some unusual rhetorical devices that take a little getting used to. He constantly refers to "black bodies" in such a way that I assumed he was building to some sort of dualist worldview in which oppressors could break or destroy bodies but could not steal minds or spirits. Instead he makes it clear that he is a materialist who does not believe that there is any part of an individual other than the physical body. If people are nothing more than bodies then discussing the body as if it was a thing apart from the person is an odd argument. He may be arguing that American society devalues black people down to nothing but bodies, or it may be the imbalance of power requires black people to struggle to preserve their bodies on a fundamental level of basic survival.

Coates often refers to white Americans as "Dreamers." He means this contemptuously, implying that white people live in a fantasy world of security and opportunity while deliberately ignoring the historic crimes on which American society is built. This is also an odd rhetorical device considering every since Martin Luther King's historic "I Have a Dream" speech, references to "The Dream" have been a staple of the Civil Rights Movement. It is surprising to see the term turned around and applied to whites as a term of derision.

Neither of these observations are intended as criticisms of the book as a whole or its author's message. They are just a couple of textual factors I found interesting.

I picked this up for free, and tried it. I'd heard that the glut of Black Panther series - based on the popularity of Coates' series - watered down the Black Panther name, made it harder to keep up with the series, and just burnt people out.   In addition, I'd add that they were stretching the stories, and they ended up just not being all that compelling. 

I did not feel this at all.   All the complexity of the original series seems to have been ditched, and I will not be continuing this series. 

I read this for one of my summer classes. We had to read and annotate 10 comics/graphic novels. Here's the annotation I wrote for that class:

Queen Shuri has vanished, and T’Challa returns home to a people on the edge of revolt and the threat of war from the neighboring country Niganda.

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet is not the easiest entry point to T’Challa’s story. Knowledge from the film assuaged some confusion, but there were still moments where I felt I was missing out because of my lack of knowledge. Since this is the first book in an ongoing series, there's a lot of set up but very little resolution.

The most striking aspect of the book is that, with the exception of one character, every single character in the book is Black. And the best aspect of the book is those characters. Black Panther is populated with complex characters, including several strong, active, remarkable women. In the book, there are clear protagonists and antagonists but there is a much less clear divide between the “good guys” and “bad guys.” T’Challa is the hero of the story, a story which opens with him assailing his own people. Aneka is removed from the Dora Milaje and punished for breaking a law even though her actions were morally right. These moral ambiguities create tension that drive the story forward.

Black Panther is not a book to pick up and read on a whim. It demands readers’ attention and concentration, and rewards it well. When I finished I wished I had Book Two in hand because I need to know what will happen next.