He works Hard and has dreams of participating in the black civil rights struggle.
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.
The novel follows Elwood Curtis, a straight-laced and principled boy growing up in the black neighborhood of Frenchtown in Tallahassee, Florida, whose dreams of going to college are dashed when he's sentenced to do time at the school. Elwood is forced to spend the rest of his days as a juvenile at the Nickel Academy.
The long string of horrors that took place at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys wasn't a secret, but it might as well have been. Former students of the Florida reform school had spoken out for years about the brutal beatings that they endured at the hands of sadistic employees, but it wasn't until 2012, when University of South Florida anthropologists began to uncover unmarked graves on the school’s campus, that the world began to care.
About the Author:
I'm the author of the novels Zone One; Sag Harbor; The Intuitionist, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award; John Henry Days, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Apex Hides the Hurt, winner of the PEN Oakland Award. I've also written a book of essays about my home town, The Colossus of New York, and a non-fiction account of the 2011 World Series of Poker called The Noble Hustle. A recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship, I live in New York City.
My Review:
This was a difficult read, with a surprising and tragic twist at the very end. It is clear that the author has done his research and presented a novel based on historical facts and covers issues associated with racism, abuse, torture, or the inequities of the criminal justice system. This is a difficult review on such a serious matter, that I have to step back in time to understand its period of the 1960s in the deep south in which the story is concentrated. The mere fact that knowing The Nickel Boys was based on a true story makes this novel even more enthralling, and haunting. There was a time jump in the novel that threw me off, but the ending well explained this stutter in the storyline. This is my first read novel by Colson Whitehead, and I listened to it in an audiobook. This was a well narrated and attention grabbing, while dramatizing the novel. Excellent read!
Links:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-finally-know-what-happened-brutal-reform-school-180957911/
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| The White House |
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The unmarked graves at Dozier Reform School
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