Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which In 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives in New York City. You can find him online at www.colsonwhitehead.com.
Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.
The most innovative and drawing part of the novel is the conception of the Underground Railroad as a railroad underground. Some of the most creative parts of the book is when Cora interacts with the underground railroad, the conductors of the "trains" and the station masters. Rick Riordan has a review for the book that I read that describes perfectly the blend of fantasy and fiction within the novel. Because the Underground Railroad as an underground railroad exists, it's hard sometimes to differentiate what's cold hard fact from what's been creatively spun a bit further. The effect that has, then, is that every single horrible thing we read feels real, because it seems entirely within the realm of possibility in a world where the railroad underground is a fact. It's an amazing conceit, and makes for a fantastic reading experience overall.
I read a bunch of reviews before attempting to write my own, because this book was challenging to read, and I wanted to see if anyone else could put words to what I experienced. One of the things I struggled with while reading was the abrupt movement of the prose. While reflective of the jerky journey Cora takes across America (both in the train car itself and in general, as she is jerked to different states without rhyme or reason), as a reader, it can be difficult to understand what is going on. Sometimes there was hardly any transitory phrases as we jumped from setting to setting, and it was hard to connect to the characters outside of Cora. The novel itself is very well researched, and I chalked up some of these challenges to Whitehead's way of making the reading of the novel feel like the experience Cora is having. I thought it, on a craft level, a brilliant way to connect readers to Cora, but on a reading level, sometimes challenging to keep up.
I really enjoyed how each leg of Cora's journey was bracketed by a short chapter from the point of view of one of the secondary characters. There was certainly one stronger than the others, but still I liked this foray into what the other characters were thinking, and what their lives were like. Caesar's was particularly heartbreaking, but I agree with other reviewers that these narratives might have been even harder-hitting if the characters themselves were more developed. Regardless, this structure really spoke to me, because we had the chance to see a bit outside of Cora's eyes for a bit, and to see a larger picture of slavery and Antebellum America.
I loved Apex Hides the Hurt and The Underground Railroad has proved to me that Colson Whitehead is an author for me to watch. I can't wait to read more of his works. Until then, you can find him online at www.colsonwhitehead.com.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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