In this Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, Colson Whitehead has written a story that makes the reader feel the horrors of slavery. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. The owner is cruel and when he dies and his even crueler brother takes over, Cora agrees to run away with another slave. He has a connection with the underground railroad and they are soon out of Georgia.

Their first stop is South Carolina where they decide to stay as it seems as if former slaves are treated well there. They are given jobs and dorms in which to live. There is plenty of food. But it turns out that there is an ulterior motive behind the kindness and Cora moves on. Her next stop is North Carolina where there is no expectation of kindness. Public lynchings are town entertainment and she spends months hidden in the attic of a former underground railroad participant. But the slave hunters come to search and Cora is captured and on her way back to the plantation where she expects a hideous, torture-filled death.

But fate intervenes and Cora is once more on the road. She ends up in Indiana where there is a large farm that offers shelter to runaway slaves as long as they can contribute. She settles into a life there where slavery is not legal and even finds love. But dreams don't always come true.

Colson Whitehead has become the voice of the racial sins experienced by African Americans. This book was the winner of numerous awards and another of his novels, The Nickel Boys, also won the Pulitzer. He uses an actual railroad in this book, a figurative device that shows just as the train was destined to overtake horse-drawn vehicles, slavery was destined to eventually be stamped out. Unfortunately, prejudice cannot be outlawed and it remains with us even today. This book is recommended to readers of literary, historical and diverse voices fiction.

Thanks so much to the publisher and to NetGalley for giving me access to this book. Such an amazing book. There are many readers that will find this book interesting. Glad to have the opportunity to read this book. It is so well written.

What can be said about this book that hasn't already been said? It's thought-provoking, at times painful to read, but always brilliant. A total pleasure.

Sometimes I “save” acclaimed books for just the right time, and for The Underground Railroad that time is now! The verdict: this is Required Human Race Reading. I'm already looking forward to reading Harlem Shuffle in September of 2021 and further appreciating the genius of Colson Whitehead!

I reviewed this for Christian Century; see below. (The review was a rave, although that was several years ago.)

I did have difficulty getting into this book, and it wasn't because of what it was about. Something with the style of writing? I enjoyed how the railroad was an actual train, that reimaginging was interesting. The detailed backstories of minor characters made it harder to get through

This novel was deserving of all the awards it won. Whitehead is a literary treasure. An important novel.

While I may have wanted more from the unique premise of the story -- the underground railroad being a real railroad -- this story is important and the writing is exceptional, bringing to life some amazing characters and moments.

Put simply, one of the hardest and most important books I've read in recent memory, and not one that I'll be able to get out of my head any time soon.

First, I'd like to offer my apologies for having taken so long to provide feedback on this book. I have started and put it down at least 4 times over the past 3 years. I'm having difficulty figuring out why but I'm just not compelled to finish. I don't know if it's becuase I'm read so many amazing reviews and my own perceptions have been biased by those or if it's just one of those books that I should love, want to love, but is just not for me. At this point, I do think I'm putting it down for good. I know I'm in a tiny minority of readers here. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Again, apologies for the lack of timely feedback.

The first thing that has to be noted here is that Whitehead's writing is beyond stunning. His sentences and metaphors are perfectly captivating and my absolute favorite part of this book. The plot itself was uncomfortable, which I appreciated, given the subject matter. The disjointed narrative (Cora's story told through varying perspectives and timeframes) made it difficult to slip into a neat linear narrative. The reader was forced to piece together Cora's story at different intervals, never quite sure when they had all the facts. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Interesting concept and excellent writing. I was intrigued by the concept of the literal railroad and wished that it was featured more throughout the story.

Set in the antebellum South, The Underground Railroad focuses on the journey of one slave woman, Cora, towards freedom. The grand-daughter of a woman who survived the Middle Passage and ended up enslaved in Georgia, and the daughter of a slave who ran away when she was just a child, Cora has spent much of her life as an outcast even among her fellows. So she's surprised when another slave, Caesar, approaches her to run away with him to find the Underground Railroad. In Whitehead's alternative history, the railroad is literal...there are stations built into the earth that spirit slaves away to the north.

Run away they do, and Cora finds herself first in South Carolina, which in this world has outlawed slavery but holds ownership of Black people itself, and then distributes them as it sees fit in service work. But they're also secretly infecting men with syphilis to study it, and sterilizing women...and then Cora finds out she's being chased by a man called Ridgeway, a slave catcher. So the next stop is North Carolina, which has abolished slavery too...out of a fear that the Black majority population of the state will rebel against their masters. It's replaced their labor with white indentured servants, and escaped slaves are publicly executed. Cora hides there for a while, but before she can devise an escape, she's caught by Ridgeway. That doesn't mean she stops fighting for her freedom, but freedom isn't an easy thing for a slave to find.

I wanted to love this. I wanted to find it a revelation. And it's good, very good actually. Whitehead's prose is both lovely and powerful. And I understand why he can't "go easy" on Cora...it reads sometimes like she's a punching bag for the universe and she barely gets room to breathe before she's knocked down again, but that's probably what it feels like to be African-American, obviously back then and to a lesser but still very real degree even now. And the characters are interesting, with Whitehead even writing one-off chapters from perspectives other than Cora's, to give us context for the people who have an impact on Cora's life and where they're coming from when they interact with her.

But I just never connected with and got emotionally invested in the novel the way I do for the books that distinguish themselves for me as "great". I cared only in a kind of distant way about Cora, and for all that the side characters were developed they mostly just faded away...when Caesar and Cora are separated relatively early in the proceedings, for instance, I never found myself missing him on the page. And while I cared about Cora and what was going to become of her, it was never in the way where I wanted to skip ahead to see how she might make it around each obstacle thrown in her path. I'm not quite sure why that was, honestly...like I said, Whitehead's writing is incredible so it's not for any lack of ability to make her more compelling on his part. It just didn't quite get there for me. Nevertheless, it's a very good book, and one that I'd recommend to just about everyone.

This should be required reading for all. The n word should make you cringe; it should make you uncomfortable. All the horrible things that happened to humans during slavery should be appalling and yet Cora never gave up. She fought for what she believed to be her human right. She fought to better herself by learning to read and write. When she had found solidarity with other people like her only to lose it she persevered.

Cora was one hell of a person to be hunted and persecuted and still come out victorious. Her experiences will never leave her but hopefully she will be able to help other because of them.

I enjoy books about the days of slavery. The heart-wrenching stories of slaves under the whip are difficult to read, but make great fiction. Colson Whitehead adds to this genre with his Pulitzer-prize-winning 2016 novel The Underground Railroad. He tells the story of Cora, a young slave who escapes from a plantation, enjoys a breath of freedom and is captured again, but ends up at a farm colony of free and escaped slaves.


I kept getting a sense that this story has been told before. No question that it has. My memory and the breadth of my reading is limited, but I couldn't help but see the borrowing from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, where Jacobs spent years hiding in an attic. I have a feeling there is a lot more borrowing from slaves' accounts of their own experience. Tribute? Cribbing? Fictionalizing history? This is what writers of fiction do, of course, I was just surprised at the similarities.


Whitehead's book has a feature that sets it apart from other slave accounts and slavery fiction. In The Underground Railroad, the Underground Railroad is an actual railroad that runs underground. On rails. In tunnels. I didn't feel like this twist added to the story itself. Other than the fact that Cora got on a train to go from place to place, rather than secretly traveling in a more conventional manner, the story was no different. The underground trains added nothing.


I expected Whitehead to add something new and insightful to the body of work of slave fiction. He did: the Underground Railroad is an actual train! But that's it. No point, no purpose, just novelty for the sake of novelty. Without that, The Underground Railroad is a decent if unoriginal novel about the evils and tragedies of slavery in the American south. The superfluous addition of the train diminishes the book.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

Three stars, because I liked it, but this is why it didn't rate more for me:
I like historical fiction. I like fantasy. This is a weird combination of both, and I've discovered I'm not a fan. I understand that he wrote about the underground railroad as he'd imagined it as a child (a real railroad, tunneled underground) but I had a hard time connecting with the story, knowing parts of it were imagined. I realize the horrors of slavery were depicted realistically, but this book would have impacted me more, if the entire story had been more based on reality, horrendous as it was.

This book has been winning award after award, which always makes me suspicious. Can it really be _that_ good? After it added the Clarke to its belt notches, I decided I really needed to read it.

I can't say that I really _wanted_ to read it, though. It seemed like one of those books that you should read to be virtuous, but wasn't necessarily going to be enjoyable. I've taken a graduate course in Civil War history, I've got a pretty good idea about what I'm going to find, and it will be horrible. No matter how good the book, I have difficulty wanting to get into that headspace for recreational reading. In fact, when I suggested it to my speculative fiction book club, there was such a lack of enthusiasm that we went with a different book.

So I decided to start the book on a plane ride. I powered through half of it, and then found time to devour the other half in a single sitting.

What was it about the book that hooked me despite my misgivings? The voice, I think. Whitehead writes in a matter-of-fact way that drew me along effortlessly. Cora is his main character. She grew up on a plantation in Georgia, but Whitehead also gives us a gloss about her grandmother and her mother. Fathers don't figure much in this book, which is mostly about the strength of women and the weakness of men. Cora has been on her own since she was about 10 years old and her mother ran away. Cora has grown up (to all of 16 or 18 years old) very tough because of this. Whitehead doesn't shy away from what slavery does to those enslaved and how it eats away at their humanity and empathy. He discusses the colored man who is the foreman's second, how this man was gentle until he was given authority, which poisoned him. In an environment this brutal, abuse rolls downhill and everyone feels like someone else's gain is their loss.

As is obvious from the title of the book, Cora ends up on the run. Another slave, sold from further north, named Caesar, asks her if she will run with him. Cora is initially sensible and doesn't want to risk her life for a remote chance, but when her plantation changes hands and an even worse owner takes over, she ends up going.

Clarke Award aside, I really don't think this book is speculative fiction. The underground railroad is a literal subterranean rail line, one which changes depending on the state of where it goes. But this can easily be looked at as magical realism or symbology as much as anything- I don't think the purpose of the book is speculative as much as it is didactic. Cora visits several states: South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana- and in each of them a horror occurs that happened, maybe not exactly at that time but certainly really did- to black people. They are experimented on to see the effects of syphalis, surgically sterilized, hung up on trees in rows along the road, attacked in their homes. None of what Whitehead describes is fiction, it's just fictionalized.

I thought about my reaction to this book. I admit I was somewhat numb, partly because I had read of all these things before, but also because the author does write in such a prosaic tone. Cora doesn't let herself react emotionally because that would kill her. So she observes, she decides, she plans, she foresees. Her ruthless pragmatism allows her to survive situations that are the death of others. Unlike other reviewers have said, this tone made sense to me. It's the viewpoint of a survivor. It comes at a cost, of course, but not at the cost of Cora's life.

The only thing that Whitehead shies away from is rape. Obviously, rape was a fact of life for slave women. Cora was raped when younger, but it's not something she has to worry about much during the book although it has left its scar. But although we see bodies hung on hooks through the ribcage while still alive, hung, whipped, beaten, rape is never right in front of the reader. It's alluded to, certainly, but we are spared looking at it closely. Maybe Whitehead didn't think he could do the topic justice from his viewpoint. It's the only thing that didn't ring true to me, though. Rape, after all, was responsible for a huge proportion of the slave population.

I don't know if this book breaks a lot of new ground topic-wise. It's extremely well-written, though, and despite Cora's detachment I really felt for some of the characters. Toward the end of the book, we find out what happened to Cora's mother. It's a short chapter, and one of the ones that moved me most. Whitehead is excellent at building tension, so that I could never relax, even if Cora seemed to be safe. She experienced both dystopia and outright horror. I think that the author's restrained tone left me room to feel on my own- a very smart move. It would have been easy to be melodramatic, which would have allowed me to detach from the book. Instead, I had to deal with my own reactions to it. I suppose, then, that numbness is my own way of dealing with trauma.

Powerful and haunting. The dose of magical realism actually felt very real. Perhaps it's because the novel is allegorical, but I felt an emotional distance from the characters. But that just could be me and my style preference and shouldn't reflect on the author or this novel's overall brilliance. The last two chapters of the book hit me hard...

This book has been on my to-be-read list forever, but I felt like I needed to mentally prepare for this one. This is the least glossed over story of slavery I have ever read and it is brutal in its honesty and the writing completely wrecked me at times.

It is the story of Cora who is leading, the difficult life of a slave and is brutally mistreated over and over again. When a fellow slave, Caesar, receives word about a new underground railroad that has been built, he and Cora try to escape to seek freedom. Ah, but freedom isn’t ever easy to achieve especially in this awful world.

Whitehead envisions in this story an actual underground railroad with conductors and in a Gulliver’s Travels twist, each time Cora gets off, she is in a different place with different rules. In one town, she is respected, educated, and treated with respect. In another, black face shows ridiculing her people are on display in the town park. In another she has to remain hidden in attic for months on end to protect herself and the family who houses her. It gives the reader a chance it experience that shaky ground, that uncertainty, that feeling of never feeling safe. The reader gets to experience the tiniest of fractions of this painful and true story of many slave stories that Whitehead has gathered.

I listened to this one and it was a great audiobook if you are looking for somewhere to spend that audio credit.

It’s brilliant, it will gut you, and it is important.

Everyone should read this story.

Everyone.

I resisted this book for a long time. Oprahs book club book? Still resisted. Pulitzer Prize winner? Okok, I'll stop resisting. I read it and it was great. There has been a lot of hype around this book and I think it's well deserved. Whitehead took the traditional slave narrative and skewed it to a new perspective. I also liked that the surreal / magical element of the literal underground railroad could have seemed realistic and wasn't overblown.