A Book That Takes Place In Your Hometown

No, it doesn't. No clue where my misconception that Memphis figures in this story came from. Instead, The Underground Railroad travels through the deep South as it narrates the tale of Cora, a third-generation slave, and the masters, slaves and freemen she encounters on her journey to freedom. Blending fantasy with history, Colson Whitehead converts the metaphorical railroad into reality: a true system of tracks that runs under both slave and free states, whisking Cora through dark tunnels on makeshift trains run by a variety of engineers.

Similar to reading about the Holocaust, The Underground Railroad is a bleak tale of violence and heartbreak without a happy ending. Whitehead creates a realistic Georgia cotton plantation where Cora is both witness to and victim of abusive masters, overseers and fellow slaves. Through an alliance with another slave, she escapes, first to South Carolina, then to North Carolina and Tennessee. Along the way, the story explores the meaning of freedom.

While interesting, some of Whitehead's inventions, such as North Carolina amending its constitution to outlaw the mere presence of blacks in the state, conflate slavery with other historical atrocities to the diminishment of each. The comparison of the state's citizenry to the postwar Eastern bloc, with children informing on their parents and a man ridding himself of an unwanted spouse through a false accusation, links slavery to communism. In a scene borrowed from Apocalypse Now, the residents of the unnamed North Carolina town Cora hides in while awaiting her next ride hang dead blacks along their roads like festive decorations. Slavery was horrific enough without these allusions.

Perhaps my quarrel with the novel is its brevity in comparison to the time that would be needed to accomplish Cora's transformation. Over the course of little more than a year, she rises from ignorant fieldhand into an erudite woman. Whitehead provides her a vocabulary and knowledge she cannot have obtained through the paucity of education she receives during the book's duration.

While The Underground Railroad is worth reading, Octavia Butler's Kindred does a much better job incorporating fantasy and reality to challenge our perspectives without requiring too much suspension of belief. ( )

I now tried two times to read this book and I just can't do it. This time I got about 50% through and gave up. I simply don't care. If someone didn't tell me that this was about Cora and slaves actually riding an underground railroad and visiting other times in history, I would have no idea what the hell I was reading. This is now the second book by the author that I couldn't finish. I think it is just his style of writing that I can't handle. I find it meandering, disjointed and bloated and I couldn't care less about any of the characters. If this book's theme wasn't slavery, no one would have paid one bit of attention to it. I read many reviews and blurbs about it - I have no idea what book these people were reading, but it sure as hell wasn't this one. Definitely not for me. ( )

Whew.
A gripping read, one that makes me wonder why the American government is so het up about Nazis when they perpetrated the same evils and worse on their own people. (I confess to finding the ongoing bigotry about 'other races' (we are, of course, all the same race) in the US baffling and horrific.)
This book highlights some of those evils, the mad hunt for escaped slaves, the denigration and punishment meted out, and not only in the South. "Friendly" states welcomed the escaping slaves and then they proceeded to sterilize them and incarcerate them in hospitals, experimenting with them in much the same manner as the Nazis did their captives. Horrifying, and portrayed so well by Whitehead. Each and every character is so well-drawn you feel their pain, their numbness.
It is a mandatory read for all of those who forget how bad times really were and don't understand why 'Black Lives Matter' is a needed campaign.
Graphic in details, though Whitehead slips past rape scenes delicately - "The women sewed her up"...enough to illustrate the horror without dwelling on it. The handing and beating scenes seemed more detailed but perhaps it was the image of the girl on the hook that finally made me recoil. We've become so blind to scenes of torture thanks to media - it's a testament to the writer's skill that several of the scenes are implanted in my mind.
Glad I read it. Couldn't put it down. Visuals still with me. Not sure about the ending. ( )

Decent story about experiencing life as an American slave. My main gripe is that the underground railroad was not a literal railroad, but this being a work of fiction I can let it pass. ( )

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2017 and other awards. Set at an unspecified time in the mid 19th century, it tells the story of Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, her escape, and various actual and near recaptures, through the seemingly more enlightened South Carolina, the murderous North Carolina (where "the negro race did not exist except at the ends of ropes"), devastated Tennessee, freedom for a while in Indiana, and then final freedom at an unspecified place in the North. It is of necessity a grim and gritty story, with horrors aplenty in all these locations. The one issue I have with this is the fantasy element - the underground railroad here is a literal, physical railway underground, not a figuratively named network of escape routes. I do not understand why the author made the decision to depict it in this way. It is unnecessary and not only adds nothing to the narrative, indeed in my view it detracts from it, as it may lead some readers to wonder, what else about the events depicted may not be real? I just feel that this detracts somewhat from the historical horrors the author rightly lays bare. ( )