The Nickel Boys
By Colson Whitehead
This week’s book won 2020’s Pulitzers Prize for fiction. This book was my book group's book for May. I read it early so other people could read my copy of the book, so I’m writing this blog a little later than I should have. Our group read one of Whitehead’s other books, The Underground Railroad, last year and both are so insanely well written, while being quite depressing.
The book is about a young black man in the 1960's that is wrongly charged with stealing a car and sent to a boys school in Florida. The school is sold as a reform school that will help shape up these boys; it was actually a place that forced the boys to do hard manual labor and where sexual and physical abuse ran rampant. The book is told from two time periods, the 1960’s and then 2010 when one of the main character’s is telling his story.
Between each chapter there are history lessons and real stories about the actual place. Sadly the school was a real place and a lot of horrible things happened there. The real school was called the Dozier School, a reform school in Florida that was open and ran for 111 years. There was a secret graveyard of all the kids killed at the school, and because many of the victims at the school were black, no one did anything about it. It’s strange to say but the history parts were the most, I don't want to say interesting, but more informative than the rest of the book.
I would recommend this book to anyone that needs a very well written book, but full disclosure it's super depressing.
P.S. my baby daughter fell asleep on me during our Zoom book group meeting like this:
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