Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen (2025) 230 pages

If you reimagine history's timeline and allow for a bit of jiggering around, perhaps you'll enjoy this short novel about Darnell, a struggling music producer who finds himself face to face with the real Harriet Tubman and a handful of her associates called the Freemans. Harriet wants to reach out to people today and to help them understand history, and to bring them to freedom. In spite of slavery not existing as it had in the past, it's clear that many people are not truly free, including Darnell, who's been afraid to live openly as the gay man he is. Darnell's task is to help Harriet and the Freemans produce a record and to put on a concert.

I do not know enough about Harriet Tubman's actual personality, but her depiction seems realistic. I enjoyed the imaginary interactions with this talented group of people.

The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, 306 pages.

Whitehead won the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a host of other prizes for this excellent novel. Cora's grandmother ended up on the Randall plantation in Georgia after being kidnapped, and bought and sold. She lives a horrific existence. Her daughter Mabel manages to escape from captivity when Cora is about eleven, but Cora is left to fend for herself and she can not forgive her mother for leaving her behind.
Whitehead, an author who seems to be able to tell an engaging and readable story on any subject, does not falter when the subject is the something as horrific as slavery. He does not hide the larger tale by focusing on his characters and their small part in history. In fact he is at his most compelling in this amazing book when he casually conveys the vastness of the horror and cruelty suffered by so many as they form the backdrop in the circles Cora travels through. Each station on the railroad is a different place and time in this warped America, and at each station Cora must witness some fresh hell as it is visited upon her or on someone she knows. I imagine that this is a book that the reader will need to return to again and again.