In this bravura
follow-up to the 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 to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned
by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his
grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black 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 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 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 whose
repercussions 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 one hundred and
eleven 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.