Month: June 2019

Review: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

E.F. Sunland

20 Books of Summer 2019: Book 2

I was blown away by Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which took the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. I went to Goodreads to log my five-star rating and was surprised to find it sitting at a solid four. It appears that the biggest factor in whether people like this book is their response to Whitehead’s treatment of the Underground Railroad as a physical railroad with trains. read more

Review: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

E.F. Sunland

20 Books of Summer 2019: Book 1

I added Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver to my shelf the same time as Uprooted. Though both books are worthwhile, I don’t recommend reading them a few months apart (maybe not even a year apart). There’s plenty of rich foreshadowing in Spinning Silver, but when I predicted a key bit of the ending, it wasn’t based on anything from this book. There are a couple characters here that are strikingly similar to characters in Uprooted and it seemed like they were on the same trajectory. (They were.) This cheapens the ending in a way that’s hard to explain. For reasons I can’t get into without spoilers, I’d recommend Spinning Silver first if you plan to read both. If you plan to read one, Uprooted is the better book. read more