🎧 Berls Reviews The Underground Railroad #COYER

Posted August 23, 2021 by Berls in Review / 3 Comments

🎧 Berls Reviews The Underground Railroad #COYERThe Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Narrator: Bahni Turpin
Published by Random House Audio on September 13, 2016
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Length: 10 hours 43 minutes
Format: Audiobook
Source: Library
Goodreads
three-stars

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

My top thoughts:

I kind of feel like I’m doing The Underground Railraod a disservice by only rating it 3 stars. It’s incredibly well written and the narration is superb. The story is compelling. I’m giving it 3 stars because, for me, it’s too brutal to enjoy at a higher rating level – even if it would have been wrong and unjust to tell it a different way. So please keep that in mind when considering my rating.

Anne and I buddy read this, as part of the COYER TV/Movie adaptations readathon. I don’t know if I would have picked it up if Anne hadn’t suggested it, and I’m thankful she did because the story is one worth having read. I know that she had a similar feeling and is also rating it 3 stars.

What I liked/didn’t like:

The Underground Railroad has a bit of historical reality, historical adaptation, and obvious fiction all mixed together. The brutality in the way the slaves, runaways, and those who try to help them are treated is very historically accurate. It’s what makes this book so hard to read, too. The adaptations that appear both Anne and I were frequently asking each other, “was that real? Did it really happen that way?” and we had to do some Googling to find out – it’s very interesting the things this book caused me to learn about black experience and how it differed from region to region. And then there’s the obvious fiction – the literal underground railroad in this book is a fantastical reinterpretation of the clandestine network that came to be called the underground railroad. And it was a neat addition to this story.

The way the story is told sometimes was a little jarring. We move between characters in a sometimes haphazard timeline that, honestly, didn’t really make a lot of sense most the time. But the majority of the story was told from from Cora’s perspective and was very engaging. I won’t say I couldn’t put it down, because as eager as I was to see her reach freedom, sometimes I just HAD to put it down because it was too much. I do think my only real criticism of the book would be the way it dwells in the negative. I’m not saying the cruelty should be glossed over; it shouldn’t. But it would have been nice if the book could have embraced the fiction element just a bit to give us an uplifting moment with a happy ending. What you get (without spoiling) is inconclusive and after ALL that Cora endured I feel little hope for her fictional future. Surely some escaped slaves had a happy ending… it would have been nice to feel that was in Cora’s future and maybe even see a little of it.

Narrator thoughts:

I’m incredibly thankful that I chose to listen to The Underground Railroad. Not only because the incredible Bahni Turpin narrates it beautifully, as has been my experience with everything she’s narrated, but because I think it made it easier to move through those particularly brutal moments.

So yes, I’d recommend The Underground Railroad, but I’d also say – prepare yourself for a difficult, worthwhile read.

NOTE: I did begin to watch the series on Amazon Prime and I have to say, it seems to be a really good adaptation. I watched 3 episodes and will probably finish it someday. But the brutality is even harder to watch than it was to read/listen to. And the sometimes random shifts seems to also hold true in the show. So I’m also not eager to finish it.
3 stars Just Okay

About Berls

Michelle adopted me as part of her blog when I decided to close down my blog, Fantasy is More Fun. The blog was dying, but my love of reading and the blogosphere was still strong as ever - so I found my new home here at Because Reading!

I'm not just a book lover, but a one time author (that hopes to be more in the future), wife, mom to the cutest, happiest, best 2 year old and step-mom to the craziest, sweetest 22 year old on the planet. My family mean everything to me and they appear frequently in the Sunday Post with Berls. So grab a glass of wine and chat books, blogging, and family with me!

Tags:

Divider

Want more awesome posts like this? Subscribe to my blog via email!

3 responses to “🎧 Berls Reviews The Underground Railroad #COYER

  1. You’ve done an excellent job of writing a review here. I’ve always loved underground railroad stories because even though they were brutal, the whole system was based on hope and some slaves ending up free with a better life. We don’t see much in the way of better life and my hopes were stomped on every time here.

    Anne - Books of My Heart recently posted: The Devil You Know by Kit Rocha
  2. I think I get what you’re saying about not being able to call it a fantastic reading experience because of the way it hit you and the jumping around with no big hopeful pay off while still being well written. That happened when I was reading a historical fiction about a Jew experiencing a death camp. While I’d like to read this particularly because much of what was related were real experiences for slaves, I really doubt I could handle it if you and Anne struggled with the brutality. Bahni Turpin is a fav narrator of mine, too.