Reviews with content warning for Suicidal thoughts - The Underground Railroad

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

Content Warnings

vedpears's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
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

4.5

Wow. What an incredible book. The material is extremely somber and heartwrenching and a consolidation of a great many horrors that real people were forced to endure.
I truly wish that the railroad aspect wasn't written so literally - unfortunately, I question if it does a disservice to the subject. I know too many people of different backgrounds who are now admitting that they think that "it wasn't as bad as -they- say it was".
I also wish the ending was a bit more concrete, but perhaps that is fine because the ramifications of slavery in the USA are still present and the disparity between black and white Americans is far too great, still - the story isn't concretely done yet in real life.

Content Warnings

carisamarie's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

3.75

Content Warnings

lectrixnoctis's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

2.0

Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American author. He is the author of eight novels, including his 1999 debut work, "The Intuitionist", and "The Underground Railroad", for which he acquired the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020 for "The Nickel Boys". He has further published two works of non-fiction. In 2002, he won a MacArthur Genius Grant.

"The Underground Railroad" starts on an evil Georgia plantation, where all anyone wants to do is escape. "Every slave reasons about it, in the morning tide and the afternoon and the nighttime. Dreaming of it. Each dreams a dream of freedom, yet when it didn't look like it." We meet Ajarry, stolen from her West African village and across the ocean on a slave boat. Her daughter, Mabel, flees the plantation and its disgusting owner, Randall, prompting a wild and empty search, and Cora, Mabel's daughter, our protagonist.
Cora and another slave Caesar are led down to a platform where rails extend into darkness and the North.

The novel is written in the third person singular and the past. The story is set during the 19th century.

The central theme of the book is slavery, and it affects people, predominantly black and natives. Although it was fascinating to read about it, it would have been better to read it in the first person since sometimes it felt a bit too objective and even a bit dry to read about the Experience of the people.

Freedom is another motive of the book. It is explained by which I live version of the railroad; however, since this is the only fantasy element in this book, it was pretty tricky sometimes to grasp everything else could've happened in real life then.

It is hard to rate this book. However, I did not feel connected with the characters at all and even felt like they didn't have any human features of the world as a personality; however, I do have to say that this book is insane research, and I would still recommend reading it just because of that however I do think if you want to learn about American history, it is better to read a novel written by people who have left during bedtime or even hysterical non-fiction books. Overall the story felt a bit lacklustre, And I would have wished to like this book more, but sadly I cannot.

Content Warnings

goodoldfashionedidiot's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring sad tense slow-paced

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

4.5

I did like the book, but the writing was somewhat confusing and I think on some parts it was written to fast and then again to slow. I never could completely fall into the storys, which is probably a good thing considering the topics.

Content Warnings

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