I expect it's something of a known fact that award-winning fiction and I don't often get along well. This is emphatically an exception. The conceit here is that the Underground Railroad in this novel is not a metaphorical railroad, something you'd get from the cover copy. It's pretty linear, as modern vaguely-literary fiction goes, with just a few short threads from someone other than the POV protag, some of which happen out of their place in the novel's timeline; but it is not an easy read--though the horrors of chattel slavery are not literally shoved into the reader's face on every page, there is not a word of this novel that is not steeped in them. Graceful and brutal and eventually overwhelmingly bittersweet, survival is the happiest ending available.
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The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings
This really just flat didn't work for me. I thought it was going to something other than it was, I guess. I should have taken a closer...

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A neat little Horror novel (big shock on the genre, there, I'm sure) that plays some interesting games with PTSD and identity, with ma...
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Reading this novel reminded me a good deal of reading Processed Cheese . America Fantastica is more subtle, and the points it's makin...
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Oh, gawds, this novel starts as a bit of a mess and wraps up like someone who read too much Naturalistic fiction and decided to go with no...
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