January 2018 Book, The Underground Railroad

New York Times Book Review, August 2016 praises The Underground Railroad:

In his dynamic new novel, Colson Whitehead takes the Underground Railroad — the loosely interlocking network of black and white activists who helped slaves escape to freedom in the decades before the Civil War — and turns it from a metaphor into an actual train that ferries fugitives northward.

The result is a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. It possesses the chilling, matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” and with brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift.

“The Underground Railroad,” chronicles the life of a teenage slave named Cora, who flees the Georgia plantation where she was born, risking everything in pursuit of freedom, much the way her mother, Mabel, did years before. Cora and her friend Caesar are pursued by a fanatical slave catcher named Ridgeway, whose failure to find Mabel has made him all the more determined to hunt down her daughter and destroy the abolitionist network that has aided her.

Traveling from Georgia to South Carolina to North Carolina to Tennessee to Indiana, Cora must try to elude not just Ridgeway, but also other bounty hunters, informers and lynch mobs — with help, along the way, from a few dedicated “railroad” workers, both black and white, willing to risk their lives to save hers.

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