Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was the kind of five star read that made me adjust the rating of an earlier review, because I realized Whitehead’s book was so much stronger. So I went back and re-ranked the previous book as four stars–still very good, but not the same experience. The Underground Railroad follows Cora, a slave during the pre-Civil War era. In the beginning of the book, Cora is a slave on a large plantation. Her mother Mabel was the only slave on the […]

Ray Carney is a man perpetually caught in the middle. As a Black business owner in Harlem he is a fixture in his community, but he has a hard time getting white-owned companies to do business with him. As a dark-skinned Black man he faces colorism from the affluent section of Harlem, including his own in-laws. And as the son of a career criminal, he finds himself struggling to escape from his father’s past while inexorably drawn back into it by his father’s old associates […]

My book club is a fan of Colson Whitehead. We read The Intuitionist (a beautifully odd book about elevator inspectors which I loved) several years ago, then The Underground Railroad (also very good, and the winner of many awards) when he came to speak at a university in city our city. We may have fangirled and fanboyed out a little in the signing line afterward. I had a library copy of his book, which he signed. Hopefully someone smiled after they checked it out after […]