Mini-Review

Cora is a slave in the antebellum South, living under a brutal plantation regime. She makes the decision to run away with another slave, Caesar, using the Underground Railroad — imagined by Whitehead as an actual, rather than metaphorical, railway.

This is a wonderful book: an accessible literary page-turner by African-American writer Colson Whitehead. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Man Booker Award. It has a lot of violence, but it’s not described graphically and is mostly understated or implied. Potentially a good contemporary substitute for To Kill a Mockingbird: year 10 level.

>Click here for content information — spoilers, enter at own risk!

Literary depictions of: racism; slavery; violence; murder; sexual assault including rape. Includes the ‘n-word’ due to historical context and representations of racism.

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