The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I updated my review after thinking about the book for 2 years, so clearly, it inspired some soul-searching and for that reason alone might be a great book to read. Apologies that my previous review was badly worded.

This book just won the National Book Award this week [and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction], so I was expecting good things. It was well-written and beautiful in some parts, but I didn't enjoy it though for the conjunction of these two reasons:

1) It was boring. At no point did the story become more interesting to me. What happened to Cora was horrible and dispiriting and Cora was dispirited, and as a result, I, as the reader, also felt dispirited to continue the book. I get that the brutal treatment of slaves happened in just this way, but for example, I never felt like I wanted to put down a book by Frederick Douglass who also described the very real horror of slavery. On the contrary, I was riveted by his writing and found myself wanting to scream or cheer him on, or sometimes to put a bookmark in, go out and fight for equality. TUR made me want to crawl under the covers.

2) For me, inserting an actual train into the story didn't work. The novel is historical fiction and was hyper-realistic throughout, so what why a (fake) real train? It didn't appear to save any narrative room, nor was the train itself in any way fantastical, magical, or otherwise interesting to me. The current day importance of a book like this seems harmed by the addition of this train. It makes an otherwise realistic account of slavery seem false rather than fiction, especially to people who might not have read widely on the topic. I find that worrisome.

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