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jfaberrit 's review for:
Underground Airlines
by Ben H. Winters
I really liked the Last Policeman trilogy, but this seems like a pretty clear misfire in execution to me. to be fair, I think there is a pretty high burden on alternate history novels of this particular type, where something bad happens in the story that didn't in real life, since it ends up indicting an awful lot of people for crimes they didn't actually commit. Much like Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America, here we have racism rearing its ugly head beyond the ways in which it actually did. Far be it for me to defend Alabama, Mississippi, et al., but they and the rest of the United States have managed to evolve their racism into new and different ways that are more complex and ultimately more thought-provoking than the simplified picture adopted here. Also, North Carolina, which voted once for Obama after all, probably has a legitimate beef with the premise. Questionable alt-history aside, the book doesn't hold together amazingly well as a novel, with many of the shortcomings in overall plotting and pacing evident at the margins of The Last Policeman evident here -- we have a primary plot that struggles at times to maintain a sense of coherence, along with side plots that serve as distractions and plot devices as much as key components. There are admittedly some worthy observations about how the racism, in an active form and not just a legacy, shapes our world today, but it doesn't really fit into the overall scheme in a way that Colson Whitehead managed so movingly in The Underground Railroad, which is simply a better book in nearly every way.