Jenny (Reading Envy)'s Reviews > The Underground Railroad

Well, I finally read it. I don't think I waited long enough because I felt like I'd read it already through all the award discussions and Oprah press and review traffic. When it was also included on the Man Booker Prize Long List and I had literally tried all of the 12 other titles, I decided to finally read it.

I had picked up on the idea that it was still the south but an actual railroad. What I wasn't really expecting was that it would be a litany of all the horrors enacted on black people in America, but just told in a more creative setting. I'm not sure what I think of this concept and at what point suffering becomes gratuitous. I keep thinking of the book that got less attention, Underground Airlines, where the author Ben H. Winters is simply more successful in asking the question, "What If?"

One common theme was that of enslavement and the many ways it can repeat, perpetuate, permeate. Early on there is this passage:

The music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.

And passages like that come up throughout the book. In many ways I felt like the same core ideas were repeating and while I agree history is like that, it made the book feel longer than it needed to, and I was ready to be done with it.

ETA: Reread in 2020 during the Tournament of Books "Super Rooster," because I was a guest commentator for the judgment between this book and Normal People in the quarterfinal rounds. I would say 4 stars is spot on, although I remembered feeling 3 stars about it.