Linda thinks water may be almost baptismal in its healing. Nancy thinks the water may symbolize first, that water is essential for life, and two, that it represents freedom and that, too, is essential. Linda notes how water reappears as a symbol throughout the book. They also like how George’s wife, Isabelle, also sacrifices prestige and comfort to start an entirely new life. Linda and Nancy like how George changes over the course of the novel and how he finally decides he will take a stand against injustice. Linda like the symbolism of the town’s name, Old Ox, that is set in its old ways. Linda wasn’t surprised at the white neighbors’ indignation that the lead character, George Walker, paid newly-freed slaves the same wage that would be paid white men.

Linda talks, too, about how the soldiers brought home stories and experiences of their actions as Confederate soldiers. Linda remarks that many characters in the book are bewildered and lost in this period of transition. She also enjoyed that, although the setting is the past, the theme of racial prejudice and anger over passing ways of life felt contemporary. Nancy enjoyed Harris’ evocative writing that draws the reader into a slower time, with a gauzy veiled past. The novel centers on the unlikely relationship between newly-freed slaves and a pacifist farmer in Georgia. But if this is an era - and a genre - that has no room for encouragement, The Sweetness of Water is finally willing to carve out a little oasis of hope.Linny and Nancy discuss Nathan Harris’ debut novel, The Sweetness of Water. As an author, Harris eventually exercises a kind of fiery Old Testament justice, which is at once satisfying and terrifying. What’s most impressive about Harris’s novel is how he attends to the lives of these peculiar people while capturing the tectonic tensions at play in the American South. Harris stacks the timbers of this plot deliberately, and the moment a spark alights, the whole structure begins to burn hot. All of this is drawn with gorgeous fidelity to these cautious characters, struggling to remake the world, or at least this little patch of it.

And he explores this liminal moment in our history with extraordinary sensitivity to the range of responses from Black and White Americans contending with a revolutionary ideal of personhood. His prose is burnished with an antique patina that evokes the mid-19th century. That this powerful book is Nathan Harris’s debut novel is remarkable that he’s only 29 is miraculous.

The sweetness of water nathan harris