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. ( )

"Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood."

Colson Whitehead's much-anticipated book [b:The Underground Railroad|30555488|The Underground Railroad|Colson Whitehead|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1469725597s/30555488.jpg|48287641] tells the story of the antebellum South while centering on the escaped slave, Cora. Whitehead's sparse writing style makes the horrors of slavery -- and dangers for all those who tried to escape or aid and abet those who escaped -- all the more striking. These vignettes stand out like lone figures on a blank canvas.

The idea of being able to be the master of one's own decision-making plays a key role in this book, which I found to be unique among books in this genre. Of course slaves have no control over any aspect of their lives, but Whitehead explores to what extent well-meaning whites were willing to let free blacks have control over their own lives.

In many ways I can see why this book is a darling among the literati. However, much as I wanted to, I couldn't connect with this book in any way that would earn more than a 3 star rating. I found the pacing to be very slow with a plot line that was jerky. In some parts of the story I felt, as a reader, a connection to Cora, but in most cases there was quite a bit of distance. Whitehead wrote of the Underground Railroad as an actual train -- with platforms, and engine, a conductor, etc. This didn't work for me at all. Perhaps I am too literal. I went from thinking it was an allegory, to being confused, then back to realizing it was an allegory.

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.



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The Underground Railroad is a powerful story mainly well told. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, I didn't enjoy reading it, mostly due to the violence inherent in telling any true or fictional story of slavery. The appallingly brutal conditions of slave life are laid stark and bare, and it made for difficult reading. I was somewhat disappointed in the way that the alternate history - an actual underground rail line - was handled, and had expected more of it, given the novel's title. I can see why the novel won the National Book Award, as its call for abolition and fair treatment of people with black skin is almost as necessary in the 21st century as it was in the early decades of American history, but I was not a fan of the book. ( )

Great writing, interesting story, a little too abstract for me but still. ( )

An intriguing and frequently horrifying look at the experience of slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War, from the point of view of the slaves, with an interesting fantastical spin. In reality, “The Underground Railroad” was a metaphor for the chain of sympathisers and safe houses who conveyed escaped slaves from the South to the northern states. In this book, that metaphor is imagined as reality — literal underground rail lines and steam engines carrying escapees north.

Though this award-winning book is definitely well worth reading, at the end I wasn’t entirely sure what this fantastical premise adds to the human story of the slaves and the appalling treatment they had to endure. It made me wonder, in fact, how much of the story was based in actual fact and what was part of a dystopian historical fantasy. I’m tempted to say most of it is based on solid, sordid fact, but without doing more research I don’t know.

Certainly on its own terms, the novel is heartbreaking as we follow the fortunes of Cora and Caesar attempting to escape from a plantation in Georgia. The chapters are interleaved with actual historical advertisements placed by slave-owners seeking the recovery of their escaped ‘property’. And there’s nothing more chilling than the way the slave-hunter Ridgeway continually and casually refers to an escaped slave as “it” rather than “he” or “she”, the same way as one might refer to an escaped horse. ( )