NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for FictionWinner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for FictionFinalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle AwardFinalist for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary AwardsLonglisted for the 2019 National Book AwardsLonglisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political FictionIn this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–and National Book Award–winning #1 … Pulitzer Prize–and National Book Award–winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow–era Florida.
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 Jr. to heart: He is “as good as anyone.” Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grand-mother, 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 that the delinquent boys in its charge can become “honorable and honest men.”
In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear “out back.” Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr. King’s ringing assertion “Throw us in jail and we will still love you.” His friend Turner thinks that 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.
Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.
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A gripping and brilliant novel based on a true story about a boys’ reformatory school in Florida in the 1960s. Whitehead is one of the most daring and gifted authors writing these days, and I will never miss one of his books.
This novel won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as the Kirkus Prize for fiction and the National Book Award for fiction. I approach these type of novels with long lists of accolades like this with trepidation, mostly because I’ve found I haven’t really enjoyed most of them. The same could be said for recent Oscar winning Best Picture movies (I’m looking at you, Green Book) or Grammy winning best albums of the year (I’m glaring at you, Morning Phase by Beck). With the exception of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I haven’t enjoyed many of the recent Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction. They have left me wanting. Until now. The Nickel Boys is fantastic and well-deserves the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. With wide, impressionistic swathes, it paints a harrowing picture of a racist boys institution in Florida during the early to mid-twentieth century, and it does a masterful job in an efficient 200 pages.
Judges of the Pulitzer Prize called the novel “a spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption.” It tells the story of Elwood Curtis, a smart, quiet, and inquisitive Black boy from Tallahassee, Florida, the kind of boy who would read encyclopedias for fun, if he owned a set. But he is also naïve and too easy-going. On his way to college, he hitchhikes in the wrong car, and is sentenced to Nickel Academy for being in a stolen car. There, he befriends a boy named Turner, and their hellish life at the racist school is revealed. Elwood and Turner are very different but ultimately very similar, too, as we learn throughout the book. By the end, you will wonder how they even got that far. Nickel Academy is Hell on Earth.
Whitehead has a marvelously observant eye, as seen here when he introduces Elwood’s boss at a local tobacco shop. “Mr. Marconi left his perch by the register as seldom as possible. Squat and perspiring, with a low pompadour and a thin black mustache, he was inevitably disheveled by evening. The atmosphere at the front of the store was stringent with his hair tonic and he left an aromatic trail on hot afternoons. From his chair, Mr. Marconi observed Elwood grow older and lean toward the sun, veering away from the neighborhood boys…” Ever so keen on details, Whitehead also shows restraint at other times, giving sparse but descriptive details, allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in some of the horrific events without bogging the reader down in the ugly details. If you’re in Hell, what’s the point of describing the details of window dressings?? Whitehead can paint a detailed picture with few strokes. Genius.
Whitehead describes Elwood’s observations of racism at Nickel as “an indiscriminate spite, not a higher plan.” And that there makes the hellish abuse of Nickel crueler and ever more undeserving to a smart boy like Elwood. He still tries to find the joy in speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. and hopes to find the deliverance of King’s promise. But his friend Turner thinks the best thing to do is avoid evil like an obstacle course. What’s the best course of action?
There is no better time than now to read The Nickel Boys, a magnificent novel that begs you to stare at the ugliness of racism and demands an empathetic response.
I loved this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this novel 5 stars.
Wow, this book. My introduction to Colson Whitehead did not disappoint. With a deft hand and unwavering eye, Whitehead makes the reader experience how it feels to be marginalized to the extent that your very life simply doesn’t matter. That’s power in the form of words. Highly recommend.
I read this book in two days. So good. Terrible, terrible- but yet there is hope in there too. Wonderful story, resilience in the face of horrors… and just not that long ago. Everyone should read it so that this sort of thing can never happen again.
Whitehead’s done it again. Have you ever sincerely wondered what it might be like to grow up black and male in America? This story is so well crafted, so well researched (of course–it’s Colson freaking Whitehead!) and so exactly what we need to read in this era of Black Lives Matter. And he totally blew me away with the ending!
I started this book before the George Floyd murder. Sometimes reads just hit you at the right time—and maybe you can’t recreate the exact same confluence for somebody, but you can sure try.
“You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.” (Because, of course, that change has to come from the deep inside…)
Big love, BFoss.
This is not a novel for the faint of heart, even though much of its power comes from the author’s skillful use of understatement. By exercising restraint, Whitehead shows that the devil is certainly in the details. Whitehead balances the past and the present quite well throughout the narrative, and the last third of the novel is deeply affecting for its portrayal of the friendship between Elwood and Turner, the central characters. Not to be missed.
Important read and so well written but there are serious triggers for abuse and sexual assault. We need to hear the stories of our community, our children, and the failures of policy, but we need to be ready too.
Unforgettable historical novel about a real boys’ reform school in Florida. Ends with a twist.
I read this in one evening. Based upon a real life place and what he learned was a murderous juvenile facility, the author creates several believable characters you can’t help but care about, and it leaves your thinking for days after.
Excellent, a must read.
I’m a blubbering mess. I want to be Colson Whitehead when I grow up.
Difficult to read at time but haunted me.
Although fiction, you forget these are not real people’s stories – and they may well be.
Colson Whitehead’s novel is more proof that you cannot legislate decency. It tells a familiar story of cultural failure to care about what becomes of people — even little boys — after they’ve entered even the grade-school level of our penal system. The Nickel reform school never existed, but Whitehead based it on another that did exist called The Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. Whether funded privately or by the state, these facilities never seem to function in any real educational capacity. Until Charles Manson’s followers massacred a house full of Hollywood people, nobody seems to have noticed or cared that he’d been in the system all his life starting from age nine. Manson never spent much time outside and was vocal in his belief that people raised in the system are crippled by it. But his petitions to be allowed to stay were denied. Whitehead’s novel tells a different tragic story, but really it’s the same tragic story, this time about black boys not old enough to be tried as adults who get sent to Nickel, one named Elwood and another named Turner. Elwood’s mistake was accepting a ride from a man who’d stolen the car he was driving. For this he will spend years at Nickel. Over and over, we see this story played out in novels and films. The fundamental fact that makes Nickel run is that we don’t care. We are willing to pay our taxes and funnel more and more money toward the system, but then we turn our attention elsewhere. We don’t pay attention to where the money goes. At Nickel, all the fresh food and other resources that should go to the boys are instead sold to local businesses at reduced prices. And the people we have put in charge so we can ignore the overall problem are people who care to the point of insanity of taking control of people of color and breaking them physically/ruining their will i.e. making them go along and obey. No boy sent into Nickel comes out with anything to show for it but nightmares, physical scars from beatings with a 3-foot-long leather strap, and PTSD. Naturally, there’s a secret graveyard for those who break what is always the golden rule of these places which is Say Nothing. There is a four-step system of sorts for moving up the ranks and “graduating” from Nickel — and a boy does go free now and then. But those that do quickly commit adult crimes and graduate to adult prisons, die of drug overdoses, commit suicide, are shot by police, and etc. It’s an old, old story. It happened to Charles Manson and here it is happening to Elwood.
It is difficult to read these stories, but we must keep hitting ourselves in the head to get it and try harder. We must absorb these tragedies and own them.
The author uncovers the horrible truth of a reform school allowed to terrorize boys for decades. A well told story deserving that Pulitzer!
I did not give this book four stars because I enjoyed it. In fact, it’s an excruciatingly difficult book to finish and not for the fainthearted. Also, unusually powerful. And the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.
The Nickel Boys is based on a true story, something you learn more about in the author’s afterword. The title refers to those youngsters who spent time at a Florida state reform school for boys. During the 1960s, both white and black boys are sent there, though they are housed and fed separately since this period coincides with Southern segregation.
Those who run the school make no substantial effort at either education or rehabilitation. Instead, the boys provide endless hours of free labor while facing continual bullying and punishment. It’s an institution where racism, sadism, sexual and physical abuse, and political corruption converge. The very reason why it’s such a difficult book to read. These are teenagers, after all.
The central character is the optimistic Elwood Curtis, unjustly sentenced to Nickel Academy and subjected to its brutality, whose only salvation comes from his deepening friendship with the skeptical Turner. How these two boys navigate a situation none of us would want to experience makes for a compelling story that is well-written. But certainly NOT fun.
This book is a fictionalized telling of the real-life Florida School for Boys, which operated from 1900 to 2011. Also known as the Arthur Dozier School for Boys, this reform institute inflicted innumerable abuses on its young charges.
Whitehead takes the same retelling approach to this horrific historical event as he does with his “The Underground Railroad.” Told through the eyes of a few fictional characters, we get a bird’s eye view of someone who lived through it without having to experience the entire scale of injustices.
I quite enjoyed the audio performance by J.D. Jackson, and will look for more books narrated by him.
This book has been on my want-to-read list for a long time and finally got to it. Sad that I put it off but thrilled that I finally got to it. A very powerful story of the brutal racism that plagued (and still does) our nation. Set in the 60’s, in Florida, it tells the history of a reform school for boys. At times, gut-wrenching and horrific, it can make one feel shame for being white. A well-told story that shines a light on the systemic racism of our country and the power of the will to survive. A must read!