The Underground Railroad in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Feb 17, 2017 Astrid Lim rated it it was amazing

Shelves: tragedy, literature, historical-fiction, culture, america, dramatic, race, history, popsugar-2017

Not for the fainted hearts!!! The story of Cora needs to be digested slowly.. it felt so far yet very near.. it felt like coming from another era.. but very relevant with current days. This is a story about how a nation as big as America has started their greatness in a really, really wrong way. The horrors, the sadness and the meanness of it, united into a touching and important story. Sometimes we need to wake up from our delusion and face the harsh reality. Highly recommended!

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Nov 04, 2017 Cari rated it liked it

Shelves: literary, historical, pulitzer, natl-book-award, nytbr-10-best, tob

I’m left somewhat disappointed given all the accolades and hype. Cora was more of a vehicle than a fully realized character, and there were just too many coincidences purely serving the machinations of the plot for my taste. Despite all this (and some truly horrific, though necessary, content) I can appreciate the importance of this story and it was worth reading.

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Apr 05, 2017 Rebecca rated it really liked it

Shelves: bookclub-read

This book is very, very well written. It's also an interesting literary choice by Whitehead to be purposefully historically inaccurate. For example, Whitehead describes an actual railroad with trains and tracks underground. Also although the setting is pre-Civil War, Whitehead depicts events similar to the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments (which were in the 1930s) and mentions an elevator in a South Carolina doctor's office (the first office building in the US to have a passenger elevator was in NY ...more

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Jan 29, 2017 Kathryn rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantastical, historical-fiction

An incredible, mesmerizing story that was both difficult to read and impossible to stop reading. While I agree with some reviewers who thought the characters were not fully developed, there's also a case to be made that in the face of such constant, overwhelming violence and oppression, survival takes precedence over everything else. I saw this in Cora: whenever she thinks it might be possible to relax her vigilance and allow herself to live a 'normal' life, something happens to remind her that ...more

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Apr 09, 2018 Alison rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, z2018-read-harder-challenge

This was extremely compelling - I had no trouble falling into Cora’s story as she escapes her plantation and keeps running from place to place. I liked how we didn’t see every step of the full journey; towards the end, I particularly enjoyed how we moved back and forth in time, in service of the story.

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May 15, 2021 Jen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: to-read-2019, to-read-2020

This book was beautiful and moving and yet painful in a deep way. It’s a look at the meaning and legacy of slavery that I think is important for us all.

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