The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner): A Novel (Oprah's, Club)

by Colson Whitehead

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century

The basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.

In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.

As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!

• ISBN10: 0385542364
• ISBN13: 9780385542364
• Publish Date: 2 August 2016
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Doubleday & Co Inc.
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 320
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780385542364

Reviews

[Berls]

I kinda feel like I'm doing this book a disservice by only rating it 3 stars. It's incredibly well written and the narration is superb. The story is compelling. I'm giving it 3 stars because, for me, it's too brutal to enjoy at a higher rating level - even if it would have been wrong and unjust to tell it a different way. So please keep that in mind when considering my rating.

Anne and I buddy read this, as part of the COYER TV/Movie adaptations readathon. I don't know if I would have picked it up if Anne hadn't suggested it, and I'm thankful she did because the story is one worth having read. I know that she had a similar feeling and is also rating it 3 stars.

This book has quite a bit of historical reality, historical adaptation, and obvious fiction all mixed together. The brutality in the way the slaves, runaways, and those who try to help them are treated is very historically accurate. It's what makes this book so hard to read, too. The adaptations that appear both Anne and I were frequently asking each other, was that real? Did it really happen that way? and we had to do some Googling to find out - it's very interesting the things this book caused me to learn about black experience and how it differed from region to region. And then there's the obvious fiction - the literal underground railroad in this book is a fantastical reinterpretation of the clandestine network that came to be called the underground railroad. And it was a neat addition to this story.

The way the story is told sometimes was a little jarring. We move between characters in a sometimes haphazard timeline that, honestly, didn't really make a lot of sense most the time. But the majority of the story was told from from Cora's perspective and was very engaging. I won't say I couldn't put it down, because as eager as I was to see her reach freedom, sometimes I just HAD to put it down because it was too much. I do think my only real criticism of the book would be the way it dwells in the negative. I'm not saying the cruelty should be glossed over; it shouldn't. But it would have been nice if the book could have embraced the fiction element just a bit to give us an uplifting moment with a happy ending. What you get (without spoiling) is inconclusive and after ALL that Cora endured I feel little hope for her fictional future. Surely some escaped slaves had a happy ending... it would have been nice to feel that was in Cora's future and maybe even see a little of it.

I'm incredibly thankful that I chose to listen to this book. Not only because the incredible Bahni Turpin narrates it beautifully, as has been my experience with everything she's narrated, but because I think it made it easier to move through those particularly brutal moments.

So yes, I'd recommend it, but I'd also say - prepare yourself for a difficult, worthwhile read.

[abookishblether]

I genuinely loved this book for many different reasons. Firstly, I know the history of how the States came to be (a little), but the specifics of it all isn't something I'm familiar with. I really enjoyed and appreciated a closer look into the life, and variations of a life, you might expect living in different states in that time period. I love the closeness we feel to Cora, in fact, I found her to be an endearing character. I really resonated with her struggle with her relationship with her mother, the sudden moments of anger she felt and admired how human she felt at times.

Similarly, the book struck a really strong emotional chord with me throughout. I really feel like this book was the one that made me feel the most this year.

[gmcgregor]

The power of Oprah Winfrey in the world of books is hard to overstate. Indeed, it is such than in 2016, her selection of The Underground Railroad for her legendary book club drove Colson Whitehead and his publisher to release it two months ahead of schedule. From there, it won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and ended up on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize. Obviously that kind of critical attention had nothing to do with Winfrey, but it probably helped the book become a #1 best-seller. Which means that a lot of people who might not have otherwise picked it up did, which is a good thing because this book bends time and history to lay out a damning case on the way America has done wrong by Black people.

Set in the antebellum South, The Underground Railroad focuses on the journey of one slave woman, Cora, towards freedom. The granddaughter of a woman who survived the Middle Passage and was enslaved in Georgia, and the daughter of a slave who ran away when she was just a child, Cora has spent much of her life as an outcast even among her own community. So she's surprised when another slave, Caesar, approaches her to run away with him to find the Underground Railroad. In Whitehead's alternative history, the railroad is literal...there are stations built into the earth that spirit slaves away to the north.

Run away they do, and Cora finds herself first in South Carolina, which in this world has outlawed slavery but holds ownership of Black people itself, and then distributes them as it sees fit in service work. But they're also secretly infecting men with syphilis to study it, and sterilizing women...and then Cora finds out she's being chased by a man called Ridgeway, a slave catcher. So the next stop is North Carolina, which has abolished slavery too...out of a fear that the Black majority population of the state will rebel against their masters. It's replaced their labor with white indentured servants, and escaped slaves are publicly executed. Cora hides there for a while, but before she can devise an escape, she's caught by Ridgeway. That doesn't mean she stops fighting for her freedom, but freedom isn't an easy thing for a slave to find.

I wanted to love this. I wanted to find it a revelation. And it's good, very good actually. Whitehead's prose is both lovely and powerful. And I understand why he can't "go easy" on Cora...it reads sometimes like she's a punching bag for the universe and she barely gets room to breathe before she's knocked down again, but that's probably what it feels like to be African-American, obviously back then and to a lesser but still very real degree even now. And the characters are interesting, with Whitehead even writing one-off chapters from perspectives other than Cora's, to give us context for the people who have an impact on Cora's life and where they're coming from when they interact with her.

But I just never connected with and got emotionally invested in the novel the way I do for the books that distinguish themselves for me as "great". I cared only in a kind of distant way about Cora, and for all that the side characters were developed they mostly just faded away...when Caesar and Cora are separated relatively early in the proceedings, for instance, I never found myself missing him on the page. And while I cared about Cora and what was going to become of her, it was never in the way where I wanted to skip ahead to see how she might make it around each obstacle thrown in her path. I'm not quite sure why that was, honestly...like I said, Whitehead's writing is incredible so it's not for any lack of ability to make her more compelling on his part. It just didn't quite get there for me. Nevertheless, it's a very good and powerful book, and one that I'd recommend to just about everyone.

[Leigha]

A woman attempts to escape slavery in this astounding adult historical novel.

An account of a young woman escaping enslavement using an underground railroad system sounds like dystopian fiction. Only it's not dystopian. Mr. Whitehead writes a poignant yet brutal portrayal of American slavery. Cora's journey is stunning; her perseverance and defiance of the status quo utterly breathtaking.

Certain liberties are taken in regards to the actual underground railroad system, but they do not detract from the historical setting. The point-of-view shifts from Cora to secondary characters throughout the novel. Chapters are not traditional in nature, tending to run very long due to their unique nature. The audio book narrator is absolutely phenomenal, hitting the right notes and tones along the way.

tl;dr A harrowing tale of American slavery told from multiple perspectives. You will not want to miss this one.

[inlibrisveritas]

The Underground Railroad is a book that I discovered on Litsy this past month and fit one of the challenges from the Read Harder Challenge from Book Riot so I decided to dive in.

This is my first Colton Whitehead book and I have to say I’m very impressed. The writing is beautiful and I think the more alternate moments in this were well done and really showed the extremes oft the time period. The fact that the Railroad takes on the physical manifestation of a a true railroad, hidden deep under the earth, really highlight the interconnection of the Railroad as well as the dangers to those operating it and how much work is involved in keeping the railroad running. We see the tireless work of those who maintain it and see the heaviness of the mystery of those who create and built it. The fact that time is spend describing the uncertainty and the terror involved with the escape, and less on the journey itself, brings in a more personal account to the story. We see Cora deal with the darkness of not knowing where she will end up and the fast paced escape that happens almost blindly in her terror. I think this book focuses more on the feelings involved during this time period and less on the physical true-ness of the acts. In some ways it does feel like it might diminish the amount of work involved in the Railroad and with those who fought to escape, but I feel that the heaviness of the emotion provided makes up for it.

The Underground Railroad is very much an account from a slave woman named Cora, as she grows tired of her bonds and makes her escape. It takes place in several places and we get to see the horrors and wonders of each new place that Cora visits. I really liked Cora, but I would have loved her more if this story had taken place through her eyes instead of 3rd person. This is a emotion heavy book, but having that ‘from a distance’ look sort of dampens the ability to connect with her.

I’m very happy I took a chance on this one. It’s hard to read at times but I definitely recommend it.

[elvinagb]

I wish I could give this 10 stars. Amazing.