Washington Black

Starred review from July 9, 2018
Edugyan’s magnificent third novel (after Half-Blood Blues) again demonstrates her range and gifts. Eleven-year-old slave George Washington Black cuts sugar cane on a Barbados plantation owned by a sadistic Englishman named Erasmus Wilde until Wilde’s scientist brother, Titch, visits in 1830 to work on the experimental airship he calls Cloud-cutter. Titch makes Wash his servant because the boy’s weight makes suitable ballast for Cloud-cutter, teaches Wash to read, and nurtures his gift for scientific thought and illustration. As Wash is transformed—and confused—by Titch’s tutelage, Erasmus becomes increasingly punitive toward him. Titch, afraid for his protégé’s life, devises a risky nighttime escape on Cloud-cutter, which collides with the masts of a ship bound for Virginia. After arriving there, the two head northward, getting as far as the Arctic before Titch, insisting that Wash stay behind, strikes out into the snow for reasons Wash cannot understand. Not knowing whether Titch is alive or dead, Wash continues his travels and scientific work. But he feels compelled to find out Titch’s fate and learn why his mentor rejected him. Framing the story with rich evocations of the era’s science and the world it studies, Edugyan mines the tensions between individual goodwill and systemic oppression, belonging and exclusion, wonder and terror, and human and natural order. The novel’s patience feels essential: the characters’ many passages from painful endings to tentative rebirths are necessarily slow and searching. Crafted in supple, nuanced prose, Edugyan’s novel is both searing and beautiful.

July 15, 2018
High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus' brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash's presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as "a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind...running, always running from the dimmest of shadows." Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader's expectations are upended almost as often as her hero's.A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.

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Starred review from August 1, 2018
?The year 1830 finds 12-year-old George Washington ( Wash ) Black enslaved on a sugar plantation in Barbados. His life changes dramatically when his master's younger brother, Titch, chooses him to assist with Titch's scientific experiments. When an innocent Wash is in danger of being charged with a death, he and Titch flee in a hot-air balloon of Titch's design. The balloon comes to ruin, but the two survive to journey to the Arctic, where they hope to determine if Titch's renowned scientist father is still alive. It is there that Titch abandons Wash. The boy, by now 13 and a gifted artist, makes his way to Nova Scotia where he meets the daughter of an eminent zoologist. The three journey to London where Wash begins to make it his business to find Titch, if he is still alive. There is something ineffable about Wash's subsequent search, just as there is a wonderful strangeness to the story, which Wash tells in his own eloquent and even aphoristic voice ( Nothing is possible until it is made so ). The story is memorable not only in its voice but also in its evocation of the horrors of slavery; and it is brilliant, too, in its construction of character. Wash and Titch are so alive as to be unforgettable, as is the story of their tangled relationship. This important novel from the author of the superb Half-Blood Blues (2012) belongs in every library.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 1, 2018

Much has been written recently about the vulnerability of the black body; think of the essays of Ta-Nehisi Coates or Roxane Gay. Canadian author Edugyan probes this subject through a remarkable coming-of-age story. Enslaved on a sugar plantation in Barbados, young George Washington Black lives a life so circumscribed that he's not even allowed to end it. Rescued from back-breaking work in the fields by amateur scientist Christopher "Titch" Wilde, nephew of the estate owner, Washington Black is schooled in math, English, and astronomy, discovering a penchant for illustration. For the next decade, he will wonder why he was chosen. Why, after they flee the island and at each stop along their picaresque journey to Virginia and on to an Arctic outpost, does Titch try to detach from the weight of Wash's need? Though physically free, Wash is never comfortable in his own black skin, and though he achieves a modicum of happiness, he will always be shackled to his past until he can fully understand it. VERDICT Edugyan, whose Half Blood Blues was a finalist for the Orange and Man Booker prizes and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, delivers a vibrant, poignant tale of a man's search for selfhood in a world where some see him as less than whole. [See Prepub Alert, 3/26/18.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2018

Working in the sticky heat of the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born, 11-year-old field slave Washington Black is terrified when he's made manservant to his master's offbeat brother. But naturalist/explorer Wilde, or "Titch," eagerly introduces Wash to a brave new world and protects him when a bounty is placed on his head, as they flee north along America's Atlantic coast to the chilly Arctic. But in their world, can friendship last? From the author of the international best seller Half-Blood Blues, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.