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lisamajeska 's review for:
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
This is a must-read. Fantastically written and achieves that "more true than the truth" feeling that the very best fiction has to it.
The premise is simple: what if the Underground Railroad had actually been a railroad? The story stays on these rails throughout, which anchors the journey of the story. The characters, black and white alike, are achingly human. The tragedy in the story is mostly matter-of-fact. As the book puts it, “a plantation was a plantation; one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.”
I tend to avoid books that are sad for the sake of being sad, which is why it took me so long to get to this one. It is easy to tug at heart strings with the horrors of history--entire genres are built on that. This book rises above, somehow. It is beautifully written and unforgettable.
The premise is simple: what if the Underground Railroad had actually been a railroad? The story stays on these rails throughout, which anchors the journey of the story. The characters, black and white alike, are achingly human. The tragedy in the story is mostly matter-of-fact. As the book puts it, “a plantation was a plantation; one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.”
I tend to avoid books that are sad for the sake of being sad, which is why it took me so long to get to this one. It is easy to tug at heart strings with the horrors of history--entire genres are built on that. This book rises above, somehow. It is beautifully written and unforgettable.