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The Underground Railroad: A Novel
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The Underground Railroad: A Novel
Unavailable
The Underground Railroad: A Novel
Audiobook10 hours

The Underground Railroad: A Novel

Written by Colson Whitehead

Narrated by Bahni Turpin

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Editor's Note

2017 Pulitzer Prize winner…

In Whitehead’s powerfully expansive novel, the all-too-real horrors of slavery are juxtaposed with surreal and allegorical elements to create a gripping novel as much about America’s present as it is about its past.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 2, 2016
ISBN9781524736262
Unavailable
The Underground Railroad: A Novel
Author

Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead was born in New York City in 1969 and graduated from Harvard College in 1991. He has written four novels, including the Pulitzer-Prize-nominated ‘John Henry Days.’ He has written for, amongst others, The New York Times, Salon and The Village Voice.

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Reviews for The Underground Railroad

Rating: 4.061296558585462 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    My feelings on The Underground Railroad are so mixed that I've changed my rating several times, first from a mere three, then up to a four, and back to just three stars. With much to think about and, yet, much that felt lacking, I think I've settled on a rating that perhaps underrates Colson Whitehead's alternate history.

    Oh, yes. If you weren't aware, The Underground Railroad is an alternate history with something of a taste of magical realism, to boot.

    Cora is a slave on a Georgia plantation undergoing the transition from a benevolent master to his two less stable sons. After a visit to a slave gathering leaves Cora beaten by one of the sons, Cora jumps at an opportunity to escape the plantation and joins Caesar, a slave from Virginia more recently purchased by her master, as he escapes the plantation and with the help of a local white man escapes on the Underground Railroad.

    Which just happens to be a real railroad. Underground.

    It's around this point that I did a double take and realized that something was off. I'm no scholar of the slave-owning south, or even of the American Civil War (though I've enjoyed a few good books about the period, including Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels and the excellent Civil War anthology With My Face to the Enemy edited by Robert Cowley), but I am pretty sure that the Underground Railroad was more of a symbolic name for the network of safe houses and secret routes to the north to help escaping slaves than a real railroad, let alone an underground railroad. Colson's conceit is an America just a bit off from our own, with a railroad that is real, is underground, and where each stop is a new state with new parameters.

    As Cora moves north, each trip on the Underground Railroad takes her to a new state, and each state has its own version of what might have happened if history had taken a slightly--or significantly--different turn. I won't give spoilers, but each stop on Cora's journey seems calculated to flesh out another piece of the American story of slaves and the journey they faced, not just in antebellum America, but in the post-war world. Colson integrates some of the particularly pernicious repressions that only arose after slavery ended (including lynchings and disease testing on blacks) in a way that makes it as sinister as it was, reminding us that America's history with race is anything but blameless.

    Indeed, here's where I lean towards wanting to rate The Underground Railroad higher: we read the book as part of a book club and while we spent very little time discussing the actual book we did spend significant time discussing the issues of race in modern America. (The irony of a group of white men discussing race from the comfort of quiet and relatively homogenous Utah does not escape me. At one point, someone asked me a direct question about how I thought we could improve how we deal with race in our country and I was forced to admit that I had no idea. All I could offer is that we could probably start off with individual attitudes of humility and acceptance of others' differences, but otherwise--who am I to tell others how to solve their problems?) Brittany, my wife, read The Underground Railroad at the same time I did, and we found lots of opportunity to discuss the issues it raised, as well. (The book she next read was Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, which she insists I should read, as well, so I guess we're on a streak?) Any book that provokes discussion and reevaluation of perspectives is, in my humble opinion, worthy of some repute.

    But why only three stars and not four? I think the way the book fell short was in Whitehead's development of characters, especially Cora. Despite lots of opportunity for building sympathy and depth, Whitehead leaves her just out of reach, almost disconnected from the sometimes more sympathetic characters around her, a woman who often seems unwilling to allow herself to feel, and thereby gain a color that might endear her to the reader.

    Would I recommend The Underground Railroad? Probably, though not without reservation. It is not for everyone, but probably the right kind of literary fiction that will meet the guidelines of the bookclub-type reader.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Honestly, the book was kind of a let down for me. I went into this thinking that it was historical fiction, but it isn't. It's historical fiction with a heavy dose of "alternate" scenarios. The Underground Railroad in this book is an actual, physical railroad. I'm not sure why the author chose to do this, because it added absolutely nothing to the story. If anything, it cheapened the story's true horrors (slavery) because it made it seem like "well, if this part of the story isn't realistic, then maybe none of it is." I wanted to like the character of Cora, but the book felt distant and impersonal to me. It was impossible for me to develop any feelings or attachment for her.It was an okay story, but I wasn't blown away by it. I don't think I'll remember much about it after a few weeks, unfortunately.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fascinating story.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Only one novel has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Arthur C Clarke Award. This one. The Pulitzer Prize is not known for giving out gongs to genre works, so it comes as little surprise on reading The Underground Railroad to discover that it’s not actually a genre novel. It’s not even borderline. Its one conceit is related to the title – that the underground railroad, a network of people who smuggled escaped slaves north, was an actual railway. Underground. A very forgiving genre reader might consider that alternate history, except, well, it doesn’t actually change history. Cora’s story would be exactly the same without the book’s conceit. Which doesn’t make sense anyway. The first underground railway was in London and it opened in 1863. The Underground Railroad takes place before the American Civil War, which began in 1861. However, not only is the underground railroad of the book historically unlikely, it’s also technologically unlikely. How would it be built? And run? But then, it doesn’t actually feature that much in the novel. Cora rides on it twice. She spends a third of the story hiding in an attic. As a dramatised history of slavery in mid-nineteenth century US, The Underground Railroad does an admirable job of demonstrating how vile and reprehensible an institution it was, although to be fair if you need that demonstrating to you then there’s something wrong with you. There is no moral justification for slavery. Of any sort. Whitehead structures his narrative weirdly and I’m not convinced it works. He skips back and forth in time, from character to character, promising stories that take nearly half the book to appear, or reporting on the death of a character before jumping to a point just before his death (and, to be honest, the scene serves no real purpose). I’m not convinced The Underground Railroad is an especially good novel. On a sentence by sentence level, the prose is good, and often excellent. But the structure is all over the place and the central conceit is a paper-thin gimmick. It’s certainly not genre. However, it tackles an important topic, and does so in a way that gives it a wide audience – and that’s something that shouldn’t be trivialised.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I couldn't get through this book. I don't particularly like these "fantasy" type books. There was a scene or two where I could connect to a character (like the black boy who was free but still worked as a slave). But most of the characters and scenes were just so odd I felt disconnected from the book and the story.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Disturbing, harsh, difficult and brilliant!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is not my usual type of book but I really enjoyed it.Its the story of Cora a slave girl in the Deep South of America and describes the harsh details of her existence on the cotton farm where she was born and raised.The white farmers are horrible and sadistic to the Blacks. They treat slaves worse than dogs.Cora is approached by Caesar another slave asking her to escape with him. She originally says no as her Mother escaped years ago and is a bit nervous but then she decides to go with him. They escape via the Railway settle, the Slave catchers aren't far behind. Cora goes into hiding there are some nice White people who try and help.Cora gets captured and is on way back to the farm she is rescued and transfers to a nice farm where she is treated fairly. The white mob raid the new farm and Cora is forced to escape again. This was a really sad but enjoyable well researched book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is another tricky one for me to assess and review. Whitehead treads a precarious line between fact and fantasy, which allows him to maintain a degree of hope in a story which would otherwise be unremittingly bleak, and as a reader from a white liberal family who has never lived in America, much of the cultural background knowledge is not available.At face value this is a very readable story of the escape of a young slave girl, Cora, from the cotton plantation in Georgia where she was born. Whitehead takes the shorthand "underground railroad" and turns it into a fantasy in which it really operates as an underground railway, while retaining certain key facts and bending others to suit the story. The fantasy elements allow the story to explore a wider geographical area and the different policies adopted by different states. To an outsider this can leave one with very little sense of what is true and what is not. There are many grizzly scenes, all of which are necessary to paint a convincing picture of 19th century America, and many of the social and political issues Whitehead explores are still potent in the context of the 21st century. Cora's story is interspersed with the stories of other characters in her family and those she meets on her journey, and real posters posted by slave catchers.It is definitely worth reading, but once again I am left feeling that I am not ideally qualified to judge it or review it fairly.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Whitehead takes us on an unconventional journey through a bleak time of history in the United States. Although he uses the factual backdrop of a period of slave-owning times, he re-imagines and creates an alternative landscape in which to tell Cora's story. Cora, a slave on a plantation in Georgia, is asked by another slave named Caesar to attempt an escape via the Underground Railroad. The factual part of the story resides in the accounts of the violence and inhumane treatment of the slaves at the hands of their owners, the slave-catchers, and all others who have a hatred of black people. Yet, the story veers off into a different world in various ways with the foremost being the fact that the Underground Railroad is here conceived as an actual railroad system built in underground tunnels running from South to North. Additionally, the several stops Cora makes along her travels from station to station and her experiences living in those areas are not factual to the histories of those places during this time period. Yet, it is within this re-imagined landscape where Whitehead is able to explore and examine various attitudes and treatments that history in a longer period has thrust upon (or attempted to thrust upon) minorities both here and throughout the world. Among these are forced sterilization, genocide, and re-settlement of their "own kind" in certain established areas. **** Review to be Continued Later****
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was a brutal read. The depiction of the way slaves were treated is heartbreaking. Although quite dark, I'm glad I read it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    So very good- there's so much to digest with this book. The writing makes it a fast read, but it's so full and richly written.
    As Cora escapes from the Georgia plantation she was born on, she travels on the Underground Railroad, literally. She stops in different southern states, with varying degrees of racism that almost make the plantation look good. And that's all I can say without spoilers.
    Whitehead takes a topic that has been much discussed, and categorizes the history of racism, pointing out our ignorances and prejudices, while at the same time telling a great story.
    It really makes you think.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Underground Railroadby Colson WhiteheadAudio narrated by Bahni Turpin3-1/2*Fictionalized account of one woman's harrowing journey out of the Deep South via the escape route dubbed "The Underground Railroad". This author's version uses a play on words by portraying the railroad as an actual system of train tracks and tunnels dug underground, each section only traveling a short distance before it would reach another stop, the fugitives departing for a short time, hiding in a location provided to them and then starting up from another station a distance away. The tunnels would just stop at certain points, then the boxcar would reverse its direction and return to the beginning of the line. Although the actual Underground Railroad received its name because the different stops along the way were referred to as "stations" and the people directing the fugitives to the next location on the route called themselves "conductors", for those who don't know this already, it wasn't literally an underground railway system. That would have made things a lot easier if it were true! In reality, the "railroad" was simply--although not simple in its execution--a series of hidey holes in barns, cellars, attics, wood piles, hidden rooms, tunnels, or just hiding places in the woods granting temporary shelter (and with luck, safety), a little food, and rest for a multitude of terrified and abused runaway slaves, led from place to place by volunteers who also had to live in fear for assisting them. The route and stops along the way changed frequently and everyone was at the mercy of trusting others to keep everything secret. Some say there may have been as many as 100,000 slaves who escaped to the northern American states and Canada through this network between the early 1800s and 1850. It's absolutely incredible if that is true.Although this is well researched and covers the topic well, the fantasy element of an actual railroad system was a bit off-putting and caused me some confusion. I found some parts very interesting and eerie, i.e. a southern town that touted itself as being a place of refuge for escaping slaves, but had an unsettling way of dealing with anyone found harboring them. It was also sad to hear of medical experiments being done to people without their knowledge (by Northern doctors). In looking this up for confirmation, I also learned that this type of experimentation occurred at a later point in history as well (from 1932-1972, if you can believe it), once again using black men who were diagnosed with syphilis unbeknownst to them, left untreated, and then just watched by the so-called doctors who wanted to study the progression of the disease. This, of course, then affected their wives and babies born to them. People are sick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskege...The main character, Cora Randall, is just a young girl when her mother, Mabel, desperately flees the plantation and their wicked master, leaving her to her own devices and to the abuses that befall young women who are left without protection. What happens next affects Cora for the remainder of her days, leaving her afraid to trust, to love, and seemingly unable to feel much emotion at all. Despite her tragic circumstances, it was still hard as a reader to feel connected to Cora because of that emptiness and lack of feeling she displayed. There were a lot of interesting characters, but we weren't given enough information about them to delve further into what made them tick. That was a disappointment. Really the dominating emotion throughout the book was FEAR. There was one shining moment where Cora received some gentle care and words from a friend, allowing her to feel a spark of hope for a short time. The ending also answered some questions for the reader which lingered from the beginning of Cora's story.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was a hard book to read and an easy book to read. It was hard because the subject matter is terrible to think about. When we look at the past, the horrendous way humans were treated is heartbreaking to say the least. Easy to read because the way this book was written it drew me in and I could not stop. The metaphoric "Underground Railroad" was translated into actual engines, coaches, cattle cars etc. that took runaway slaves to new places in real tunnels. The station masters and conductors were all in the story, but they ferried their passengers to houses with actual train stations built underground. It was an interesting premise.

    The story of Cora is amazing. She spoke to me as I read about the horrors, the highs and the lows of her life. She is an extremely resilient and strong character and I agree with other reviewers that I wish her story did not end in this book. In fact, it just stopped, there needs to be more. I would love to know where she ended up, what her life became etc. I liked the sections that were interjected to give us background on the various people she met along the way that both helped and hindered. It filled out he story knowing more about them and what caused them to do what they did. A wonderful read and I recommend it to anyone.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The idea of an actual railroad built underground transporting slaves to freedom is neat, but the novel itself could stand alone without the railroad.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Mind-numbing angst, physically exhausting, tense reading. A very timely and needed book. No white-washing or romantic notions of slavery are left unturned and exposed.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    So much pain. This is a tremendous achievement. Fine writing. Carefully structured storytelling. An aggregation of pain and evil inflicted not just by an overseer or a plantation owner but by communities, cities, states and an entire country.

    Finding new ways to shock and create empathy for centuries of injustice and bone-deep rottenness, Whitehead has written something good and valuable. The discomfort comes from feeling the continued importance of reading these stories.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I can't think of any criticisms. This is just really good. Emotionally hard-hitting, excellent writing, good history. I love it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Gripping, intense and heart-wrenching. Alternate history, but for the most part not too far from the truth. Shaking the notion of the railroad itself, turning it to an actual one, brings further food for thought. This is an important book for many different reasons, history should not be buried and forgotten. Not when it makes someone uncomfortable, not when we can still see traces of it today. The only way to learn and understand previous mistakes is to know of them.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    OK, I am hung up on the concept of an actual underground railroad. I think I understand the author's use of the concept, it constantly "derailed" me as I read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A harrowing and brutal account of slavery in the American South and a woman's attempt at escape.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Follows a slave girl's escape from a Georgia plantation. Some fanciful notions of the railroad, which is presented as a read railroad, underground. She gets off at various "stations" - South Carolina, North Carolina & Indiana. It's the early 1800s, so free slaves are barely tolerated in some parts, and any blacks run out of town in others. The author also calls the readers attention to the atrocities to the Indians as they took over the land and presented white Europeans as the superior race. Interesting that one of the characters called the struggle between white and black the real "Great War", not WWI
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    With Cora's vividly told saga wound with the clever Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead builds an unbearable and terrifying tension of fear, hatred, horror, and revenge."...working the spirit..." in so many ways....If I did not fear more nightmares, it would rate five stars.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In "The Underground Railroad", Colson Whitehead combines several genres to fully illustrate the horror of American slavery and the slave trade. The novel is primarily a work of historical fiction, set approximately in the 1850's, although there are anachronistic features, such as skyscrapers, mechanical elevators and medical/scientific procedures that involve blood lab work and microscopy that would not appear until decades later at the earliest. The title refers to the real Underground Railroad, a network of agents and safe houses that served to help escaped slaves reach freedom and safety in the free states of the North, or better yet, Canada. But in Whitehead's telling, the Railroad is actually a system of subterranean passages, extending hundreds of miles, through which pass trains carrying runaways from station to station and state to state. This fictional Railroad is the chief wonder of a science fictional or fantastic nature that the author employs as a metaphor for the African American struggle for freedom, from slavery times and extending forward in time to the civil rights movement of the modern age.The central story of the novel is that of Cora, a young woman among the enslaved on a cotton plantation in Georgia. She is the granddaughter of Ajarry, a West African woman captured by slavers and brought to America as cargo in an hellish slave ship on the Middle Passage. Ajarry's daughter is Mabel, who is the mother of Cora. Mabel, unable to endure the constant terror and degradation of life on the Randall plantation, flees one night into the swampland beyond the plantation, apparently following the North Star to freedom. She is never heard of again, which greatly irks the slavecatcher Ridgeway, hired to track her down and bring her back. Cora, her little girl, grows up wondering how her mother could abandon her, but also fascinated by the example of her escape. As Cora matures into womanhood, she realizes that she is at the mercy not only of her white masters, the Randall brothers and their overseer, but also of their black henchmen in the plantation's hierarchy of coercion. When Caesar, a fellow slave who is literate, having been taught to read and write (a felony in every slave state) by his former owner in Virginia, approaches her with the proposal that they escape on the Underground Railroad, she at first hesitates, then accepts the idea. She is convinced by the savage beating she receives from the psychotic Terrance Randall, one of the two brothers who owns the plantation, when she intervenes to shield a child he is thrashing with his cane. He represents the slave owning class at its very worst, sadistic and irrational. Most slave owners were not as insanely cruel as him, but plenty were, and Whitehead has no lack of historical evidence from which to draw of how horrific slavery was even under the majority of the "kindly" masters.Once Cora and Caesar reach the first station of the Underground Railroad, the novel, which up to then is pretty much a straightforward work of historical fiction, starts to blend in departures from the historical timeline which feature imaginative touches of science fiction and fantasy. We enter an alternative universe in which the slave system is radically different in South Carolina and the other states, each unique in its approach to the "peculiar institution" and the "Negro problem". Whitehead jumps ahead in history to borrow issues, atrocities, and movements from the late 19th to mid 20th century to present the three centuries of the pain and struggle of the African American experience to fit within Cora's story.Colson Whiteheads's novel "Zone One" is a superb satire of contemporary American society in the form of a zombie apocalypse tale. The "Underground Railroad" is also a fantastic horror story with elements created from the author's imagination that did not exist, as he depicts them, in the "real" world. But he does not invent the horror of slavery and the slave trade and, despite the science fiction and fantasy that play their parts in the novel, it is a gripping lesson in history from our terrible past that haunts our troubled present.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    You know that it's going to be a hard story to read to begin with. I just had a hard time following the story line. It stopped and started in the timeline so I had a hard time following it. If the chapters would've had dates on them it would've helped. The bases of the story line is something to read good to read about.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great book if you love historical fiction. Reminded me a lot of Somebody Knows My Name. It was so interesting learning how the Underground Railroad really worked as its workings were never discussed in my Social Studies classes. I listened to this book on audio and sometimes got a little lost because the book moved around in time and occasionally another POV was used. But I blame myself for that... I am new to audio books and I doubt that would have been a problem if I was reading this book or if I wasn't distracted in traffic. Unfortunately I don't have a rewind button in my car. FYI, I enjoyed the narrator too.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Cora is a slave on a plantation in Georgia who, like other slaves, has heard rumors of a fantastical Underground Railroad which could deliver her to freedom. But unlike our world, this is a real wood and iron rain running on real tracks in real tunnels underneath the USA. Cora escapes her plantation and travels on the Railroad to various other places in an effort to find freedom and evade the cruel slavecatchers that are hot on her trail. The book reads almost like science fiction without actually having any science fiction in it. The railroad acts as a kind of TARDIS or Stargate, transporting Cora between disparate dystopias known only as "South Carolina" or "Indiana" (though none of them are actually out of the range of terrible things that have been done to African-Americans through history). Even the ending is left very ambiguous, in classic sci-fi fashion. I found the story style fascinating and even though this book didn't blow me away like I was expecting it would, I can't wait to read more by this author.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Best for: People who like good, intense writing and want a bit more insight into slavery in the U.S.In a nutshell: Cora escapes the plantation she is enslaved on and faces more challenges and danger.Line that sticks with me: “Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.”Why I chose it: It’s been on my shelf for a few months; my visiting brother-in-law suggested it was a good book to bring on our family vacation last week. Review: Colson Whitehead is a talented writer. He tells a compelling story about a brutal time in U.S. history, weaving in components that aren’t necessarily accurate from a time perspective but that still happened. He doesn’t pull any punches with the horrors of life as a slave and punishment of slaves, but this book doesn’t feel like torture porn. It is graphic but not voyeuristic.The story itself is fascinating. Mr. Whitehead follows Cora but also tells some of the story of her grandmother and mother, as well as of the people she encounters along the way. We never sympathize with slave owners, but Mr. Whitehead also allows them to be more than just caricatures with twirling mustaches. But what’s better, he allows for the people helping out on the underground railroad (which, in this telling, is an actual railway that is buried underground) to be less than saintly. I also appreciate that the individuals in this book are fully developed and provided with things to do that aren’t just in service of the main character. Cora, however, is a remarkable woman. She is conflicted. She is brave, but not reckless. She thinks things through. She is skeptical (rightfully) of others. She doesn’t start out totally naive, but Mr. Whitehead draws her out so that she matures in her understanding of the motivations of others. She wants to survive, and she wants to believe that perhaps better things can happen for her.I’m happy that this book moved up to the top of my to be read list; if you have it on yours but haven’t picked it up yet, I promise you won’t be disappointed if you start it today.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I am right down the middle with The Underground Railroad. On one hand, it is a brilliant work that drives the devastation of slavery into your very marrow. On the other hand, it is the most inconsistent slosh that makes no sense.Everything was humming along beautifully. We had a heart wrenching story of this girl who is living a life of terror, and getting a good sense of what that life is like for her, and then she takes off on the "underground railroad". Literally. Choo, choo, chugga, chugga. Now I know this author knows that there wasn't an elaborate train system running beneath ground, but for some reason he chose to interject this dose of magical realism...and then there are a few other oddities such as this that I was apparently too dense to see what it was really all about.Now, there were more times of reality than not, and the reality is ugly, torturous, and a real awakening, or reawakening, for all of us, concerning both the slaves and the abolitionists. It is just unfortunate that it was the last half of the book where I struggled with the mixture of magical realism, and inconsistent behavior by characters. For example, the ruthless slave hunter who randomly buys a dress for one of his captives, and takes her out to dinner with no motive whatsoever, and no change of heart. Just randomly.I don't know what else to say here, except to reiterate my level of confusion over whether to tell everyone I know to read this for the exemplary parts of the story that translate reality to the reader, or to tell no one because of the portions that were completely disconnected from reality.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    So many different emotions come with this book. From sheer anger to utter devastation, it packs a punch. It completely consumes you and makes you take a look at what you have and take for granted every day. This book is amazing and I can't say enough about it. Cora was one tough cookie and following her journey was an eye opening experience.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A little Steam Punk, a little _The Man in the High Castle_ re: the American Civil War, and of course ceaseless violence to the enslaved. Whitehead brilliantly captures the past is prelude rut the US continues to roll in, of course including our last miserable election. May we all dodge the coming regulators.