Finished Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Liked it a lot, but I need to think more about why I don’t rate it as excellent. Stories of people surviving a horror that seems unending — The Road, The Orphan Master’s Son — can be tricky to tell, because you need tensions between hope and despair. The Underground Railroad was only a page-turner for 75% of the novel. However, the themes and descriptions of slavery in America were hair-raising.
