Critical Assessment "In his dynamic new novel, Colson Whitehead takes the Underground Railroad—the loosely interlocking network of black and white activists who helped slaves escape to freedom in the decades before the Civil War—and turns it from a metaphor into an actual train that ferries fugitives northward. "The result is a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. It possesses the chilling, matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s 'Beloved,' Victor Hugo’s 'Les Misérables' and Ralph Ellison’s [...]