Reviews - Riverside Public Library

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* Over the course of his previous five novels, Whitehead (Zone One, 2011) has conducted an imaginative, droll, and eviscerating inquiry into the blurred divide between American mythology and American history, especially the camouflaged truth about racism. In this magnetizing and wrenching saga, Whitehead tells the story of smart and resilient Cora, a young third-generation slave on a Georgia cotton plantation where she has been brutally attacked by whites and blacks. Certain that the horror will only get worse, she flees with a young man who knows how to reach the Underground Railroad. Everything Whitehead describes is vividly, often joltinglyrealistic, even the novel's most fantastic element, his vision of this secret transport network as an actual railroad running through tunnels dug beneath the blood-soaked fields of the South, a jolting and resounding embodiment of heroic efforts and colossal risks. Yet for all that sacrifice and ingenuity, freedom proves miserably elusive. A South Carolina town appears to be welcoming until Cora discovers that it is all a facade, concealing quasi-medical genocidal schemes. With a notoriously relentless slave catcher following close behind, Cora endures another terrifying underground journey, arriving in North Carolina, where the corpses of tortured black people hang on the trees along a road whites call the Freedom Trail. Each stop Cora makes along the Underground Railroad reveals another shocking and malignant symptom of a country riven by catastrophic conflicts, a poisonous moral crisis, and diabolical violence. Each galvanizing scene blazes with terror and indictment as Whitehead tracks the consequences of the old American imperative to seize, enslave, and profit. "Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood." With each compelling character, some based on historical figures, most born of empathic invention, Whitehead takes measure of the personal traumas and mass psychosis that burn still within our national consciousness. Hard-driving, laser-sharp, artistically superlative, and deeply compassionate, Whitehead's unforgettable odyssey adds a clarion new facet to the literature of racial tyranny and liberation. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

BookPage Reviews

A daring modern masterpiece

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, September 2016

A cursory peek into his backlist reveals that there is no such thing as a "typical" Colson Whitehead novel. Having tackled everything from post-apocalyptic zombie horror to jocular coming-of-age shenanigans in the Hamptons, this prizewinning author seems to have the philosophy that big risk equals big reward. So it should come as no surprise that The Underground Railroad, his sixth novel, is not only his most daring but also his very best—and most important—book to date. It's also the latest selection of Oprah's Book Club.

In The Underground Railroad, Whitehead dives into the past for the first time, transporting readers back to pre-Civil War America and the plantations of the South. We are introduced to Cora, a third-generation slave in Georgia who has never set foot off her master's property and for whom the idea of fleeing is unthinkable—that is, until a fellow slave, Caesar, approaches her about hitching a ride on the rumored Underground Railroad to the North. With a ruthless slave catcher hot on their heels, they embark on a perilous journey through America in search of a freedom that feels increasingly elusive.

A sly reframing of Gulliver's Travels within the traditional black slave narrative, The Underground Railroad is an arresting tale that puts Whitehead's imagination and intelligence on full display. His inspired decision to have Cora adventure through the South by means of a literal subterranean locomotive suffuses the narrative with a fable-like quality, but Whitehead's overall approach is far from whimsical. Throughout her journey, Cora is confronted with some of the most disgraceful facets of the period, from eugenics programs to the Fugitive Slave Act, and the narrative is frequently grim.

Whitehead exercises his artistic license, deviating from the historical record to create an augmented reality. But his skillful balancing of intellect and fact with emotion and highly nuanced storytelling only makes the meditation on the insidious values that allow prejudice and brutality to continue to flourish all the more indelible. Chilling in its timeliness, The Underground Railroad is a devastating literary masterpiece that should be considered required reading.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Colson Whitehead on The Underground Railroad.

BookPage Reviews

Book clubs: New in paperback

George Saunders, a master practitioner of the short story, delivers an extraordinary first novel with Lincoln in the Bardo. In 1862, with the Civil War under way, President Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son, Willie, succumbs to typhoid fever. He is buried in a cemetery in Georgetown, where Lincoln, wild with loss, goes to be with his son. Saunders uses history as the springboard for the rest of Willie's story, which takes place in the bardo—a sort of limbo where the young boy coexists with ghosts who aren't quite ready to leave the world behind. Willie's experiences in the transitory spiritual realm stand in contrast to the goings-on of material reality, from Lincoln's grief to the unfolding war that is sundering the nation. Even as he plumbs the nature of a father's sorrow, Saunders brings a sense of playfulness to the ghostly proceedings. Winner of the Man Booker Prize, his narrative draws upon elements of history and fabulism. It's a daring novel that defies easy classification.

WELCOME TO NEW YORK
Historical-fiction buffs will happily surrender to Francis Spufford's sweeping debut novel, Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York, a spirited narrative set in the 18th century. Richard Smith, 24 years old, arrives in New York from London and proceeds to cause a stir. He ruffles the feathers of Lovell, a marketeer in Golden Hill (where the financial district now stands), to whom he proffers a bill for 1,000 pounds sterling. Over dinner, he offends Lovell's lovely daughter, Tabitha. Believed to be a papist, Richard is chased by a gang through the unsavory quarters of the city. When he's rescued by Septimus Oakeshott, a government official, Richard becomes caught up in New York's political turmoil. Meanwhile, the real purpose of his arrival in America remains a mystery—one that's central to the novel. Writing in the dialect of the time, Spufford constructs a narrative with plot twists aplenty and an overall tone of good humor. This rousing novel is a rewarding adventure from start to finish.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction, Colson Whitehead's hypnotic novel The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, a young slave on a Georgia plantation who's determined to make her way to freedom. When she learns of the Underground Railroad from Caesar, a new slave from Virginia, she teams up with him to escape the plantation and find a new home. Whitehead fantastically portrays the Underground Railroad as a functioning mode of transport, with engineers and miles of tracks under the earth. As they travel the railroad, pursued by slave hunters, Cora and Caesar make their way across the South in a dangerous quest for freedom. Whitehead's visionary narrative includes the stories of Cora's mother, Mabel, as well as Ethel, who provides sanctuary along the way. Rich in detail and assured in its historical conceit, this is a beautifully wrought speculative tale that's destined to become a classic.

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kirkus Reviews

What if the metaphorical Underground Railroad had been an actual…underground railroad, complete with steam locomotive pulling a "dilapidated box car" along a subterranean nexus of steel tracks? For roughly its first 60 pages, this novel behaves like a prelude to a slave narrative which is, at once, more jolting and sepulchral than the classic firsthand accounts of William Wells Brown and Solomon Northup. Its protagonist, Cora, is among several African-American men and women enslaved on a Georgia plantation and facing a spectrum of savage indignities to their bodies and souls. A way out materializes in the form of an educated slave named Caesar, who tells her about an underground railroad that can deliver her and others northward to freedom. So far, so familiar. But Whitehead, whose eclectic body of work encompasses novels (Zone One, 2011, etc.) playing fast and loose with "real life," both past and present, fires his most daring change-up yet by giving the underground r ailroad physical form. This train conveys Cora, Caesar, and other escapees first to a South Carolina also historically unrecognizable with its skyscrapers and its seemingly, if microscopically, more liberal attitude toward black people. Compared with Georgia, though, the place seems so much easier that Cora and Caesar are tempted to remain, until more sinister plans for the ex-slaves' destiny reveal themselves. So it's back on the train and on to several more stops: in North Carolina, where they've not only abolished slavery, but are intent on abolishing black people, too; through a barren, more forbidding Tennessee; on to a (seemingly) more hospitable Indiana, and restlessly onward. With each stop, a slave catcher named Ridgeway, dispensing long-winded rationales for his wicked calling, doggedly pursues Cora and her diminishing company of refugees. And with every change of venue, Cora discovers anew that "freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a fores t is dense with trees up close but from outside, the empty meadow, you see its true limits." Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller's deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass' grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft's rococo fantasies…and that's when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is. Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank. Copyright Kirkus 2016 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews

A Pulitzer Prize finalist and MacArthur Fellow, Whitehead goes all out in this imaginative reconstruction of the antebellum South. Here, the Underground Railroad is not metaphorical but real, a welter of tracks and tunnels hidden beneath the soil. A slave named Cora, brutalized by her Georgia master yet shunned by her own, determines to escape via the railroad with newly arrived slave Caesar. She inadvertently kills a white boy trying to capture her, then arrives with Caesar in South Carolina, the ruthless slave-catcher Ridgeway on their heels.

Library Journal Reviews

Pulitzer Prize finalist Whitehead (John Henry Days) here telescopes several centuries' worth of slavery and oppression as he puts escaped slaves Cora and Caesar on what is literally an underground railroad, using such brief magical realist touches to enhance our understanding of the African American experience. Cora, an outsider among her fellow slaves since her mother's escape from a brutal Georgia plantation, is asked by new slave Caesar to join his own escape effort. He knows a white abolitionist shopkeeper named Fletcher with connections to the Underground Railroad, and as they flee to Fletcher's house, Cora saves them from capture with an act of violence that puts them in graver danger. "Who built it?" asks Caesar wonderingly of the endless tunnel meant to carry them to freedom. "Who builds anything in this country?" replies the stationmaster, clarifying how much of America rests on work by black hands. The train delivers Cora and Caesar to a seemingly benevolent South Carolina, where they linger until learning of programs that recall the controlled sterilization and Tuskegee experiments of later years. Then it's onward, as Whitehead continues ratcheting up both imagery and tension. VERDICT A highly recommended work that raises the bar for fiction addressing slavery. [See Prepub Alert, 3/7/16.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Publishers Weekly Reviews

Each thing had a value.... In America the quirk was that people were things." So observes Ajarry, taken from Africa as a girl in the mid-18th century to be sold and resold and sold again. She finally arrives at the vicious Georgia plantation where she dies at the book's outset. After a lifetime in brutal, humiliating transit, Ajarry was determined to stay put in Georgia, and so is her granddaughter, Cora. That changes when Cora is raped and beaten by the plantation's owner, and she resolves to escape. In powerful, precise prose, at once spellbinding and ferocious, the book follows Cora's incredible journey north, step by step. In Whitehead's rendering, the Underground Railroad of the early 19th century is a literal subterranean tunnel with tracks, trains, and conductors, ferrying runaways into darkness and, occasionally, into light. Interspersed throughout the central narrative of Cora's flight are short chapters expanding on some of the lives of those she encounters. These include brief portraits of the slave catcher who hunts her, a doctor who examines her in South Carolina, and her mother, whose escape from the plantation when Cora was a girl has both haunted and galvanized her. Throughout the book, Cora faces unthinkable horrors, and her survival depends entirely on her resilience. The story is literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Sept.)