The Nickel Boys

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Fiction
2019 Doubleday
Finished on June 15, 2020
Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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.

I received a copy of The Nickel Boys for my birthday and decided to add it to my stack of books for this year's 20 Books of Summer reading challenge. Colson Whitehead's previous novel, The Underground Railroad, has been on my radar since it was first published, but I hadn't heard much about this newer release, which is based on the real story of the Dozier School in Florida. 

The hardcover edition is just over 200 pages and a fast reader could finish it in one sitting. I'm not terribly quick, but the first half was so compelling, I zipped through the book in two days. Whitehead's detailed descriptions of the brutal treatment of the boys (both Black and white) in his fictionalized juvenile reformatory are not for the faint of heart. I felt a great sense of foreboding as I read, and noticed that I was holding my breath as I turned the pages. The second half of the book jumps back and forth between past and present, which I found somewhat disruptive and confusing, but once I finished the book, I understood Whitehead's reasoning for that format and applaud him for the startling conclusion. This is a tough, but important book, and while I'm not sorry I read it, it's not one that I enjoyed.