Loved itNext up is The Underground Railroad by Coulson Whitehead. This is one I didn't read when it came out. I just read it a couple years ago and it was on my TBR probably since 2016 though. Definitely met my expectations.
Review 1 of 2
The Underground Railroad (2000)
Others: Leaning positive 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.
- ISBN:
- 9780349726809
- Length:
- 321 pages
Genres: historical fiction, literary fiction
Lists: …
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Loved it
Not a fanthe Underground Railroad was such a disappointment to me I felt like it on a craft level the way that it explained its characters was so unengaging and there were lots of plot holes
Review 1 of 2
Mixedsome sections were a little bit slow but i think that the story that coulson whiteheads tells in this book is one worth reading
Review 1 of 2
Mixedthat being said it was a little slow in parts for me so as a as a read like I'm looking at this really is like books that I just was like oh my god I want everybody to read this because it was so great yes it was intellectual it was important it was profound but it wasn't like I was calling everybody to tell him to read it
Loved itamazing book about slavery about the true horrors of what slavery was a great book that mixes element of fantasy on the Fantastical with historical reality
Loved itThis book is difficult to read. Colson Whitehead is brutally honest about what it was like to be a slave.