There has been a lot of buzz surrounding The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead. It was, of course, on my most-used book list this year: NPR’s Best Books of 2016. But just in case that’s not enough, it also won the Pulitzer Price and the National Book Award. I’d heard a little bit about it before reading it, and I have to say I wasn’t sold on it. A real underground railroad during slavery? I couldn’t understand why Whitehead would feel the need to add that fantastical […]
Historical Fiction that Feels Real
Best for: People who like good, intense writing and want a bit more insight into slavery in the U.S. In a nutshell: Cora escapes the plantation she is enslaved on and faces more challenges and danger. Line that sticks with me: “Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.” Why I chose it: It’s been on my shelf for a few months; my visiting brother-in-law suggested it was a good book […]
In America the quirk was that people were things.
Social justice warrior alert: this was a really tough one, and also should be mandatory reading. I grew up in Canada, and stories about the American Civil War and the Underground Railroad have always been fairly romantic to me: good and caring citizens resisted the status quo and helped shuttle slaves from town to town until they were safely out of harm’s way in the North, often fabulous Canada where we were the cooler (haha) neighbor, and where former slaves could habeas their own damn […]
The Underground Railroad, Literally
This was a complicated read for me. On one hand I appreciated the style of writing. I was able to disappear into the plot and the characters. I could tear through page after page and not feel the time pass. On the other hand I wonder if people know that this isn’t a historically accurate book? Colson Whitehead takes us on a journey from a plantation in Georgia to…wherever Cora, the protagonist ends up. At first the book seems like it’s going to be similar […]
Another book about slavery that a lot of white people liked.
When your spouse works for a church denomination, there’s a good chance that his boss’s boss ends up in your book club. And that’s what happened with L. She had our February pick, and I decided not to waste any time when she announced that we’d be reading The Underground Railroad in February. I only had to wait a few days for my hold to come in, and here we are! The Chancellor is finishing it right now, so you’ll have to see his review, […]
“Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.”
I don’t know if I will recover from The Underground Railroad anytime soon; its brutal subject matter compounded by current events. I listened to the audiobook because it became available at my local library before the hard copy. There was as lot of beautiful language and descriptors which came alive with the narration but it was also hard to literally listen to all the racial slurs and recounts of abuse. “On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other […]
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