Reviews tagging 'Classism'

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

11 reviews

parenthesis_enjoyer's review against another edition

dark emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Slavery, Racial slurs, and Racism

Moderate: Murder, Abandonment, Religious bigotry, Infertility, Gaslighting, Pregnancy, Violence, Hate crime, Suicidal thoughts, Sexism, Panic attacks/disorders, Forced institutionalization, Gun violence, Torture, Misogyny, Kidnapping, Rape, Sexual assault, Suicide attempt, Stalking, Injury/Injury detail, Infidelity, Grief, Confinement, Death, Fire/Fire injury, Sexual violence, Sexual harassment, Pedophilia, Excrement, and Death of parent

Minor: Abortion, Chronic illness, Medical trauma, Alcohol, Child abuse, Ableism, Alcoholism, Body shaming, Animal death, Medical content, Colonisation, Classism, and Child death

sakisreads's review against another edition

challenging dark tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

✨ Thrifted ✨

Wow. Far out. This was (obviously) going to be a heavy book, but I was unprepared for it 😳 The content warnings as usual will be included below.

Initially I found it difficult to get into, in the way that it was written, but once we delved into Cora’s life I found it difficult to put down. Usually multi-generational stories are challenging for me to read for some reason, but this one I was able to find the links between Ajarry, Mabel and Cora.
Cora and Royal also made me go 🥹

OBVIOUSLY we hated Ridgeway - he was fucked up. I found Mingo interesting; as someone who’d bought their freedom looking down on others felt bizarre and complicated and difficult to contend with.

4 out of 5 stars for me, thank you so much ✨

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racial slurs, Child abuse, Physical abuse, Slavery, Racism, Genocide, Death of parent, Rape, Blood, Body horror, Classism, Colonisation, Confinement, Death, and Gaslighting

tigerkind's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

„A plantation was a plantation; one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.“

A capitivating read, especially interesting if you’re familiar with other (neo) slave narratives. Focusing purely on the reading experience I found the book a bit predictable and the style alienating from the character’s emotions and suffering - but I think it fits the narrative. The story is not indulgent in recounting the emotional and physical horrors of slavery (though they’re there, no doubt about it) but focuses more on perseverance and persistence.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Gore, Sexism, Sexual assault, Abandonment, Confinement, Medical trauma, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Sexual violence, Slavery, Religious bigotry, Blood, Cursing, Domestic abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Murder, Pedophilia, Alcohol, Rape, Sexual harassment, Xenophobia, Fire/Fire injury, Forced institutionalization, Grief, Gun violence, Kidnapping, Racial slurs, Racism, Torture, Adult/minor relationship, Animal cruelty, Child death, Classism, Death, Excrement, Hate crime, Misogyny, Trafficking, Genocide, and Violence

charlotteih's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

heart wrenching, tragic, sad, disgusting, humorous, beautiful. an epic portrait of the black american experience, and the complex, nuanced machine driven by white oppression. whitehead’s characters are vivid and consuming, his reflections and storytelling just the same. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Rape, Self harm, Misogyny, Mass/school shootings, Racism, Slavery, Suicide, Suicide attempt, Medical trauma, Confinement, Gore, Physical abuse, Forced institutionalization, Fire/Fire injury, Death, Classism, Injury/Injury detail, Emotional abuse, Child death, Sexual assault, Mental illness, Hate crime, Domestic abuse, Genocide, Trafficking, Torture, Religious bigotry, Alcohol, Violence, Pedophilia, Sexual violence, Racial slurs, Abortion, Murder, Kidnapping, Colonisation, Body horror, and Schizophrenia/Psychosis

greatexpectations77's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Whew. This one is a really rough read, but the writing is so excellent. It's extremely distressing, but it's an important read. Absolutely will read this author again.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Gun violence, Kidnapping, Torture, Death, Gore, Grief, Xenophobia, Emotional abuse, Misogyny, Murder, Police brutality, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Stalking, Trafficking, Blood, Classism, Confinement, Genocide, Hate crime, Injury/Injury detail, Religious bigotry, Slavery, and Violence

Moderate: Infidelity, Abandonment, Pedophilia, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Sexual content, Toxic friendship, Toxic relationship, Alcohol, Bullying, Child death, Child abuse, Excrement, Physical abuse, and Sexual assault

Minor: Animal death, Colonisation, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Forced institutionalization, Pregnancy, Fire/Fire injury, Gaslighting, and Medical content

mads_reads_books's review against another edition

dark reflective sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racial slurs, Genocide, Slavery, Violence, Stalking, and Racism

Moderate: Incest, Colonisation, Infertility, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicide attempt, Blood, Classism, Confinement, Grief, Kidnapping, Pedophilia, Domestic abuse, Murder, Death, Suicide, and Trafficking

thecriticalreader's review against another edition

challenging dark slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.25

Since I enjoyed Colson Whitehead’s book Harlem Shuffle, I decided to pick up arguably his most famous novel, The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. 

 

Blurb: 

Cora is an enslaved field worker at the Randall Plantation in Georgia, a place of hellish brutality and cruelty. She and a fellow slave named Caesar decide to make their escape using the underground railroad, which consists of an inconsistent and ever-changing network of train tracks and locomotives. The book follows Cora as she uses the railroad to travel to different states, each with its own laws and philosophies regarding race and slavery, all the while fleeing from the slavecatchers who hunt her down with a rabid intensity. 

 

Review:

When I picked up The Underground Railroad, I hoped for an engaging story with characters I could root for and an interesting, original exploration into slavery, race, and America. Unfortunately, I got neither of these things. 

 

Before diving into my problems with the book, I want to praise Whitehead’s writing. Each sentence is carefully crafted for maximum effect, and while sometimes I cringed a bit at certain lines that read as too heavy-handed, others struck me as poignant and profound.

 

Since Whitehead spends so much of the relatively short book having the main character encounter different places and scenarios as well as switching the perspective to other characters, Cora felt underdeveloped. Cora and the other characters serve more as a vehicle through which Whitehead can explore his ideas rather than real people, so at a certain point I stopped caring about the narrative as a whole. The villains of the story were bizarre and unbelievable, which is not ideal in a story about slavery—the best stories about slavery show enough of the white oppressors’ humanity for readers to understand what forces corrupted them, while refusing to forgive or excuse their immoral actions. I might not have minded the underdeveloped characters if he had tackled his themes and ideas in an original and deep manner, but that was not the case.

 

The Underground Railroad provides an alternate version of United States history. Almost all of the events, ideas, philosophies, and circumstances it contains do show up throughout US history, but he warps events, geographies, and timelines so that Cora faces what feels like nearly every major race-based attack on black people and learns about every major racist philosophy in the span of a few years. It read as if Whitehead wanted to write a book about slavery, but he wanted to be original about it. So, he used an interesting but half-baked premise to cram hundreds of years of black oppression into one book, neglecting meaningful characterization in the process. Instead of exploring the nuances of race relations and the American identity, his mishmash of horrors felt surface-level because he tried to tackle so many things at once. I think that this book may have been better as a series of short stories, where he could take the premise of each section and flesh it out in a Twilight Zone-esque narrative without having to worry about connecting everything or writing complex, sympathetic characters. 

 

Ultimately, the payoff of this book did not come close to justifying the book’s strange contrivances. The idea of a literal underground railroad—built in a world with nineteenth-century technology—is absolutely ludicrous. However, I was willing to overlook it if it allowed Whitehead to say something important or interesting. Unfortunately, the opposite is true and I worry that some readers will have the wrong takeaways from The Underground Railroad. Readers with a very rudimentary knowledge of American history might take a lot of the book at face value, thus gaining a warped and incorrect understanding of US history. Other readers who know enough to understand that Whitehead is condensing the narrative and switching things around, but who cannot tell exactly where he is doing so, might assume that part of the fictionalization is him exaggerating the horrors of slavery, especially since slavery’s cruelty is easy to dismiss as fictional unless one knows better. The best-case scenario is that someone without extensive knowledge of American history reads his book as a fictional introduction to some of the basic themes of slavery and race in America and use it as a launching point to explore the factual versions of these events. 

 

In theory, someone who knows enough about American history to pinpoint exactly when, where, and how Whitehead manipulates events should stand to gain more from this book, but unfortunately the only lesson I “learned” was that racism has corrupted every aspect of America’s past, present, and future—an idea that anyone who has studied African American history will have already encountered in more complexity, emotion, and detail in other texts. Left without anything to grab hold of, I ended the book annoyed at the underdeveloped nature of the premise, characters, and plot.

 

 

The Run-Down: 

You will probably like The Underground Railroad if:

·      You are looking for an introduction to the main themes and ideas of African American studies through a fictionalized, alternative history narrative.

·      You don’t mind a book sacrificing character development or believability for the sake of a unique premise.

 

You might not like The Underground Railroad if:

·      You want to read a character-centered story with complex, highly-developed protagonists and villains.

·      You are looking for a historically accurate work of historical fiction.

·      You dislike dark, violent stories .

 

A Similar (but much better) Book: 

Kindred by Octavia Butler. Similarities between these books include:

·      Stories with black enslaved protagonists in antebellum America

·      Use of fantasy (Kindred) or alternative history elements (The Underground Railroad) to explore themes of race and slavery in America

·      Exploration of how slavery affects America’s past, present, and future

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Death of parent, Child abuse, Child death, Forced institutionalization, Genocide, Kidnapping, Racial slurs, Violence, Rape, Grief, Confinement, Hate crime, Sexual assault, Slavery, Injury/Injury detail, Racism, Torture, Medical trauma, Murder, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Pedophilia, Abandonment, Sexual violence, and Trafficking

Moderate: Blood, Classism, Panic attacks/disorders, Colonisation, Fire/Fire injury, Ableism, Pregnancy, Mental illness, Miscarriage, Suicidal thoughts, Gun violence, and Misogyny

Minor: Bullying, Chronic illness, Suicide, and Alcohol

katrina_daquin's review

emotional sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racial slurs, Trafficking, Rape, Colonisation, Slavery, Child death, Racism, Classism, Violence, Death, Suicide, Physical abuse, and Kidnapping

darren_cormier's review

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Classism, Child death, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Torture, Colonisation, Emotional abuse, Kidnapping, Murder, Racism, Racial slurs, and Slavery

Moderate: Abandonment

Minor: Sexual assault

alyssagirardi's review

adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Classism, Grief, Racism, Racial slurs, Colonisation, Violence, Torture, Slavery, Physical abuse, and Hate crime

Moderate: Child death, Murder, Rape, Abandonment, Blood, and Sexual violence