Aug 29

Aug 29 The Nickel Boys

Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Doublday
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is “as good as anyone.” Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is a high school senior about to start classes at a local college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides “physical, intellectual and moral training” so the delinquent boys in their charge can become “honorable and honest men.”

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors. Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King’s ringing assertion “Throw us in jail and we will still love you.” His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.

The tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision with repercussions that will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys’ fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy.

The book is based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children.

TL;DR Review

The Nickel Boys is not an easy read. But it is worth all the hype, and it absolutely deserved the Pulitzer it won.

For you if: You like tough reads that tell truths.

Full Review

“If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That's how he saw it, how he'd always seen things.”

Honestly, I am so late to the conversation on this book. I was always going to read it, because I read the National Book Award for Fiction longlist, but I can’t believe I waited so long. And even after it won the Pulitzer! Deedi, what are you doing?

This book is not an easy read. The main character, Elwood, gets sent to a segregated boys’ “reform school” in Florida in the 1960s, inspired by a real place and actual historical events. It’s essentially part prison, part outlet for terrible, racist people to take their anger out on young men, especially young Black men. He doesn’t really belong there (in fact, even the “guilty” boys don’t really belong there), but he’s sent there just the same, and it rips his life up just like it does for all of them.

I was ready to be emotional. I was ready to hurt for these characters. I…was not ready for the ending. So much wow for Colson Whitehead’s storytelling, craft, prose, characters, all of it.

Don’t be like me. Don’t let this sit on your TBR anymore.