December Book Group Choice

 Because of COVID and the health restrictions we were unable to have our annual Holiday cookie exchange and dinner. We set up a recipe exchange to share favorites but we all missed the joyfulness of face to face visiting and laughing. Our year wraps up with a Zoom discussion of our December book choice was interesting and engaging. This Alternative History novel by Ben H. Winters gave us a lot to talk about. 

Below is a brief part of the book review from NPR 2016: 

"Underground Airlines" imagines that the Civil War never happened. Rather, Lincoln was assassinated before he took office. And in an act of compromise, some states were allowed to maintain slavery. Those slave states, known as the Hard Four, consist in the present day of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the reunited Carolinas. They're demarcated from the rest of the U.S. by heavily patrolled borders.

The other states in the Union have agreed that any slave or person bound to labor, as they're called, must be returned to the corporate plantation from which they've escaped. That's where Victor, the anti-hero of this noir-ish novel, comes in. Victor is a bounty hunter working for the U.S. Marshals Service. He's adept at infiltrating abolitionist groups and retrieving runaways because he's black himself. Or rather, as Victor precisely tells us, he's moderate charcoal with brass highlights, which is one of the 172 varietals of African-American skin tone delineated in the U.S. Marshals Service field guide.

When the novel opens, Victor is sitting in a diner in Indianapolis with a Catholic priest who's suspected of running a rescue cell of what's called the Underground Airlines..."