The Underground Railroad in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Feb 05, 2017 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was amazing

Shelves: pulitzer-winner, lotsa-buzz, only-reading-because-of-the-buzz, alternate-planes-and-histories, national-book-award-winners, 100-best-of-21st-c, literary-schmiterary, historical-fiction, era-early-mid-1800s

She let the farm convince her the world is other than what it will always be.

I was surprised by how much I liked this. I had read Zone One and thought it was good but not great, and I usually don't like Oprah picks, and the reviews for this book on FR are mixed, and the subject matter sounded pretty depressing .... but my Goodreads group chose it for the February read, and my hold came in at the library, and I sat down just to read the first few pages, and holy cow I didn't want to put it do

She let the farm convince her the world is other than what it will always be.

I was surprised by how much I liked this. I had read Zone One and thought it was good but not great, and I usually don't like Oprah picks, and the reviews for this book on FR are mixed, and the subject matter sounded pretty depressing .... but my Goodreads group chose it for the February read, and my hold came in at the library, and I sat down just to read the first few pages, and holy cow I didn't want to put it down. Whitehead's slightly emotionless style, which bugged me in Zone One, is perfect here. The only way to get through these atrocities is with the Emotion Meter turned way way down.

I'm not really sure if it's okay to say I "liked" it, or it was "great" - because can you say that about books that include rather vivid descriptions of atrocities and torture? I wanted to keep reading it, I wanted to know what happened to Cora next. I could barely stand to put it down. It was riveting, in the best and worst ways.

After I finished this, I had to set it down and think for a while, to figure out what it was I had just read. I ended up adding it to my "alternate planes and histories" shelf, because I think this is more of an alternate history than a real history. The atrocities happened, the runaway slave advertisements were real, but the rest of it is just slightly skewed. (The most obvious example: there was not an actual underground railroad, as there is in this book. But that's not the only difference, it's just the one that people seem to notice first. The descriptions of the country in this book are not historically accurate, but they feel accurate, because each situation did happen, in another way. (view spoiler) As Whitehead puts it: "each state is a different state of American possibility. ... And each time our protagonist gets out of the station in a new place, we sort of rebooted America in a different sort of way." you can read the rest of his interview here: http://www.npr.org/2016/08/06/4889698...) That off-kilter nature of the story keeps you just a little more uncomfortable than you might otherwise have been, and that really added to the reading experience for me. This is not a history book!

This book is about power. It’s about the power of words, to create a world for the reader. It’s about the power in learning how to read. It’s about the power that some people wrongly hold over other people. It’s about the power of a group of people acting together, and the power of a group of people acting against each other. It’s about the power of truth, and fable, and falsehoods; the power that a falsehood can hold, believing it to be true all your life, and how that affects your actions (or doesn’t affect your actions). And it’s about the power of the hidden truth that you never learn. And this book is about the power of the reader, to interpret things as she will, not necessarily as the writer intended. Each meaning is the true meaning.

Cora kicked Ridgeway in the face three times with her new wooden shoes. She thought, If the world will not stir itself to punish the wicked. No one stopped her. Later she said it was three kicks for three murders … But that was not the truth of it. It was all for her.

And this book is about inevitability. The inevitability of life is that it just keeps coming, every day, until it stops, and you never know what’s around the corner. Most days are just like every other day, until one day is not, and you don’t know, you can’t see it coming. And sometimes there is power in never giving up, in never accepting the inevitability of your circumstances, even if maybe you can never change them. Sometimes there is no power at all.

In life some people will betray you, and some people will help you, and most people will be indifferent to you. And you can’t always tell who is who, not even after it happens. ...more

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Mar 31, 2018 Jessica Haider rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, bookriot_2018, 1000_books, bipoc-author, magical_realism

BOOK RIOT READ HARDER CHALLENGE 2018 - fulfills #13: An Oprah Book Club selection

I loved this one though I have heard mixed reviews from others. I found it to be captivating! This is a blend of historical fiction with a touch of magical realism regarding a tweak on exactly how the underground railroad operated.

HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

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Jul 27, 2017 Etchison rated it really liked it

This was good. Really good. Interesting and disturbing and sad and engaging and thought provoking.

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Jun 22, 2020 Julianne Dunn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Colson Whitehead has created another masterpiece and it is deserving of all the awards. I 100% recommend this to people. Narrated by Bahni Turpin (so so good), the story mostly follows the slave Cora as she works on a Georgia plantation and then tries to escape to freedom (not a spoiler, it's literally the description on the back of the book). Whitehead does not shy away from very graphic details of the torture and violence done to slaves and freed blacks by slave owners, slave catchers, and jus ...more

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Jan 23, 2017 Kirsten rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audio-read

A really amazing read. Seriously.

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Jul 26, 2020 Kerry rated it liked it

This is a story of Cora, a slave on a Georgia plantation, who embarks on a escape with Cesar. I listened to this account of her struggles and progress as she makes her way northward with several stops along the way. She is exposed to a variety of conductors from the railroad and environments in different locations where she adapts to survive.

Some of the stops and the events are horrible situations, sometimes in your face and others tampered down. Nonetheless, it's a challenging life and most of ...more

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Jul 23, 2017 Martin rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2017books

Liked, didn't love. Harrowing and thrilling and horrifying and stunning. But also episodic, without a complete set of fully dimensional characters. "Enjoyable" probably isn't the best word, but it was completely engrossing throughout. Just felt like a lot of those characters could have been 10-15% more human and it'd have been an all-time masterpiece. ...more

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Dec 12, 2016 Julianne Dunn marked it as to-read

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