The Underground Railroad follows Cora from childhood on a cotton plantation in Georgia through her young adult life as she tries to escape slavery and find freedom in the North. She meets friends and enemies along the way, gets captured more than a few times, and can't begin to know what it means to live a carefree life. She is aided by the the underground railroad, a network of allies and abolitionists working to help free slaves. Whitehead, however, takes it a step further and imagines the underground railroad as a literal train track underground that helps fugitives flee their owners. The story is told mainly through Cora's point of view (third person) but occasionally breaks to secondary characters.
Like I said above, this book brought the 19th century South to life. So much so that I was practically groaning at the torture and punishments slaves were put through. I just cannot imagine treating human beings like they're property, animals. It's something I knew happened, but this Whitehead opened my eyes to it in a whole new way. There were so many heart-wrenching scenes throughout this book. I mean every time I thought maybe Cora could be happy, something horrible happened. I just wanted her to reunite with her mother, fall in love, have her own children, learn to read for crying out loud! I just wanted her to be able to relax! This was the most compelling part of the story: following Cora's journey. I had to know where she was going to end up.
What I wasn't crazy about was the character development, meaning I didn't think there was much of it. Although we follow Cora from birth to young womanhood, I don't feel like I ever got to know her really well. I was certainly rooting for her, but it wasn't because I really liked her as a character (although I didn't dislike her), it was because she (and the other slaves) didn't deserve to be treated way she was. And if the main character wasn't completely fleshed out, you can imagine the secondary characters weren't either. I think the chapters from the other points of view were supposed to help with that but I found some of these more confusing or distracting than necessary or interesting (except for the one at the end...you'll know it when you get there!) I guess I found all of the characters to be rather cold and unapproachable (can that be a thing for characters in a book??).
The other aspect of this book that bothered me was the timeline. There was a lot of back and forth between childhood and adulthood, past and present. The book definitely did not follow chronological order, which it wouldn't absolutely have to except I often had to reread sections to reorient myself about where I was in relation to where was a paragraph ago. I think Whitehead's goal here was to reveal certain things at certain times. He would often work backward as a way of introducing a new setting, but I found it a little jarring and disjointed.
Overall, the need to know what was going to happen to Cora outweighed the things I didn't like about Whitehead's style choices. This was a great read, but definitely not because it gave me warm, fuzzy feelings. Instead, it made me angry about the injustices that took place in the past and the injustices that are still happening in the present. America may have made progress since slavery in the South, but we still have a long way left to go. I think that is Whitehead's real motive behind writing this story and he certainly drove it home for me.
3.5/5 Stars
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