The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) by Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (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!

Reviewed by Berls on

3 of 5 stars

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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.

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  • 14 August, 2021: Finished reading
  • 14 August, 2021: Reviewed