UPDATE: I was so wrong about this one! 
 After winning the MBP en The Pulitzer I gave this a second try. 
 The first time I kind of lost interest, it didn't grab me enough and I started reading diagonally half way through and it ended then and there. 
 To feel more involved and closer to Cora I tried the audiobook this time. Again the story had to grow on me, but I felt the distance between me and the main characters decreasing. The final part blew me away. 
 I still think the book could have been even more epic and moving, because the tone is sometimes a bit journalistic and I prefered Cora to be written in the first person POV, but this is definitely a 4 to 5 star book and deserves these major prizes. 
 This double reading experience made me wonder about my lack of patience, the importance of timing and mood, the fact that if I start to be annoyed by something in a novel I start looking for evidence to comfirm the source of this annoyance. It's a bit similar to a leaking faucet in a beautiful hotel room. In the future I will have to try to neglect this, or get over it or find a wonderful melody in the leaking faucet... 
 This was my original review: 
 "Honestly? And I say this in the utmost neutral, objective and convinced way: this is not such a good book. The idea, the premise, the mere scenario is great, but the actual book itself? It's a weird experience that you read a slave story throught the eyes of a slave and you feel cold, unengaged, distant, even sometimes bored about it. I guess it was a deliberate choice to write the story in a factual, cold, hard kind of way, but it didn't work for me. 
 To think that this is a National Book Award shortlister, while Greenwell's What belongs to you didn't make the final 5! Was this due to the topic?"