About This Book
"Course of the Waterman is an unforgettable first novel... Robson's story combines stark, down-to-earth prose with a surprising lyricism." – Pat Conroy, author of Beach Music, and Cassandra King, author of The Sunday Wife.
"With Course of The Waterman, Nancy Taylor Robson has emerged as a major new voice from this ancient American region." –Ted Widmer, Director, C.V. Starr Center for The Story of The American Experience
"Robson pierces to the heart of the waterman's life – and to our hearts – in this tale so beautifully told."–Richard Ben Cramer, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of What It Takes
"A captivating coming-of-age novel that immerses the reader in the world of the Chesapeake waterman. Told with vivid detail, it is a moving and inspirational story that will appeal to all ages."–Elizabeth Nunez, American Book Award-winning author of Bruised Hibiscus
Seventeen-year-old Bailey Kraft, descended from a long line of Chesapeake waterman – river royalty – knows where he is going. He will "follow the water like his father, grandfather, and generations of men before him. The work is backbreaking and often dangerous yet framed by the breathtaking beauty of the Chesapeake; it is a bred-in-the-bone life. But it is also a dying livelihood. Fish stocks are plummeting and with them, the harvests. Watermen, unable to earn a living, are being forced to give up their time-honored way of life. Yet Bailey is a Kraft---river royalty---with the Kraft gift for finding fish coded into his genes. He has a sense of purpose and belonging, until the day his father shatters his lifelong plans. Suddenly, he must fight the people he loves most, including his best friend, to hang on to his birthright. Set on the Chesapeake Bay's Eastern Shore, Course of the Waterman is the coming-of-age story of Bailey Kraft; his tough and determined little sister, Hannah; his best friend, Booty; and Booty's bitter, alcoholic father, Tud. Bailey faces fear, loss, and wrenching changes; yet amidst it all, he glimpses the unexpected possibilities that life can offer.
Bailey is surrounded by a handful of characters who are as vividly imagined as he is: his parents and younger sister and the Warrens, Tud and his son Booty, the latter more brother to Bailey than friend. R_obson, indeed, has fleshed out her characters and explored their interlocking relationships--all of which are changed during the course of this story--more fully than most authors can in twice as many pages. Robson's book explores the obligations of friendship and the bonds, stronger than rivalries and animosities, that hold together a community of people who need one another to survive--"the pull and haul of relationship, gift, and obligation."
Like her characters, Robson grew up on the Chesapeake, and she worked for years as a deckhand on a coastal tug. (She tells her story in Woman in the Wheelhouse.) She couldn't have written this book the way she did without that experience. Readers like myself who aren't familiar with the life she describes--most of us, surely--will encounter some unfamiliar vocabulary here, but context is sufficient to get the meaning across. The first paragraph immerses the reader at once in the life of a Chesapeake waterman:
"The trotline groaned over the roller as it came up out of the blue-black Elizabeth River on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Braced against the boat's wooden coaming, seventeen-year-old Bailey Kraft was poised, dip net ready, scanning for the bait twisted every eight feet or so into the mile-ong line. That was where the crab would be--if there were a crab. As he watched, a shadow rose from the dark water and came into focus, sharpening into olive shell and blue-green claws that clung to a frayed gray eel chunk tied to the line. When the crab broke the surface, Bailey leaned out, scooped it up, and dumped it into the bushel basket at his feet."
