You all know that the famed Underground Railroad back in slave days wasn’t really a railroad, right? No train cars, no tracks? If that’s how you understood it, you are correct .

In Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, his heroine Cora heads north, speeding on train cars in deep-dug tunnels. This lends a fantasy feel to the book.

I hoped for something closer to what the real fleeing slaves experienced. There would have been no shortage of drama to draw from. This book records “hair-breadth escapes and death struggles.”

To be sure, Cora faced her share of narrow escapes and what-not, but she also dropped into scenes where I either dozed off as the author set up the who/what/where, or he never explained any of it, leaving me to guess what was going on.

Read Fast, Eat Slow has featured Whitehead before, so we know the man can write. And Underground portrayed horrors of slavery that I had not considered before (the utter unpredictability of their lives, for one).

I did not, however, fall in love with this story.

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