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30 Books in 30 Beach Days Day 28: "The Underground Railroad"


Today's selection, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, will have you speeding along at a breakneck pace to discover the fate of its protagonist, runaway slave Cora. In this breathtaking novel, the winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the famed metaphorical railroad takes a physical form: runaway slaves move from secret station to secret station, knowing neither the length nor the ultimate destination of their journeys, but assured that each is preferable to the journey's origin. The slaves put their faith in a select number of white people and, always, in the darkness.

Though it jumps occasionally in perspective, this is Cora's story, and we understand right away that it is no fairy tale -- it will not have a purely happy ending, if its ending has any happiness at all. Whitehead proves early on that no character is too important to be eliminated, no horror is too horrific to be described, and so the reader chugs along in a state of perpetual breathlessness, constantly fearful that the train of Cora's own tale will turn back southward.

Cora is an immediately likable, incredibly strong heroine -- a consummate survivor. She trusts no one, and no one can gain access to her deepest thoughts, save for the reader -- and that, we uncomfortably feel, might even be viewed as a violation were Cora aware of it. Cora's lack of trust stems from real atrocities that she's experienced: abandonment, abuse, torture. She has seen the very worst in humanity and survived in spite of it.

And yet, Cora is forced time and again to put her faith in people whom she doesn't trust and, in many cases, doesn't know. She's forced to hope for the best, and people pleasantly surprise her as often as they don't.

The Underground Railroad is a story about human nature: the good, the bad, and the ugly, and it is a story about the long-lasting effects of human-on-human abuse, which don't end with the arbitrary declaration of "freedom." As the novel follows Cora across states and in various degrees of liberty, it and she -- and, of course, the reader -- ponder what it truly means to be "free."

Rating: 5/5

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