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Book Reviewed by:It is the present-day, and the world is as we know it: smartphones, social networking and Happy Meals. Save for one thing: the Civil War never occurred.
A gifted young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service. He's got plenty of work. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four." On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn't right - with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.
A mystery to himself, Victor suppresses his memories of his childhood on a plantation, and works to infiltrate the local cell of a abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines. Tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he's hot on the trail. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who won't reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw's case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child who may be Victor's salvation. Victor himself may be the biggest obstacle of all - though his true self remains buried, it threatens to surface.
Victor believes himself to be a good man doing bad work, unwilling to give up the freedom he has worked so hard to earn. But in pursuing Jackdaw, Victor discovers secrets at the core of the country's arrangement with the Hard Four, secrets the government will preserve at any cost.
Underground Airlines is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we'd like to believe.
Ben Winters imagines a different history for the United States in Underground Airlines by changing the time of a single precipitous event: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In Winters's alternate history there was no Civil War, and Lincoln's assassination in Indianapolis on the way to his inauguration was "the martyrdom that saved the union." His death sparked a political compromise. The United States remained a union, but one with slave states and slavery tolerating states. Fans of alternate history will want this for their libraries. Those new to the genre could find no better book to explore the concept...continued
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(Reviewed by Gary Presley).
The U.S. government changed the portrait image on the U.S. $20 bill. It used to be President Andrew Jackson and now includes abolitionist Harriet Tubman. By 21st century standards, 19th century military hero and politician Jackson could be classified as a racist and an indirect perpetrator of genocide. By 21st century and 19th century standards, Harriet Tubman was heroic. Born into slavery, abused and mistreated, she later said of herself, "I grew up like a neglected weed - ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it." Escaping from Maryland to Pennsylvania freedom, Tubman became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, who "never lost a passenger." Few there are who better exemplify moral and physical courage.
In his novel ...
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David Shafer, National Bestselling author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Underground Airlines is like nothing I have ever read before... You're set down in motion on a tilted mirror and then it's turn after gripping turn - my every next hour depended on which way he went.
