Two boys at a brutal Florida reform school in the 1960s try to survive in different ways -- and the novel holds its most devastating information until the final pages.
About This Book
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors.
Who This Is For
Best for readers who want something unflinching: morally complex, heavy, and honest about the worst of things. The prose is accessible: you can read this quickly and it never asks too much of you. It moves quickly: once you're in, it's hard to stop. Not the right choice if you're after something comforting or redemptive.
Best Read When
Best read when you're in the mood for something dark and uncompromising, and a read that's fast and propulsive.
What It Explores
The Nickel Boys explores survival and what extreme circumstances ask of people, identity and the gap between who we are and who we pretend to be, power structures and how they shape individual lives, and redemption — whether it is earned, possible, or ever truly complete.
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