August Book Report: The Nickel Boys

Since I finished reading it, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen to me that The Nickel Boys book might very well be the best book that I have ever read.  I’m a voracious reader so those of you who know me understand what  high praise this is.  This novel deserves it.

Set in Florida in the 1960s, Colson Whitehead’s writing pulls together the story of two teenage boys - Elwood and Turner - who find friendship with one another after they meet at The Nickel School, a juvenile detention center cum reform school of sorts set in Eleanor, Florida.  When the novel first opens, we meet Elwood, a Black teenager who has been raised by his grandmother and is nearly a Senior in high school.  Elwood is bright and hard-working and as he reads and listens to the words of Martin Luther King, Junior, we learn of his plans to attend college, to make a promising life for himself.   We clearly see that he can achieve this modest goal and he comes so close…..

But it’s not to be - something the reader can feel coming with a sickening dread - and Elwood finds himself at The Nickel School, accused of a crime he didn’t commit and descending into a world of fear and injustice that no one deserves.  The fictional Nickel School is based upon a real-life horror, the Dozier School of Florida, which operated for 111 years and is responsible for the kind of systemic injustice that Americans prefer not to think about it.  The Nickel Boys invites the reader to think about it; to think long and hard about the nation we are.

When the Pulitzer Committee awarded the 2020 novel of the year to The Nickel Boys, the committee declared it, "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."  The novel is spare but it is not sparing.  Reading it in the Summer of 2020, amidst the stories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many, many more African Americans let down by the systems charged with protecting them, the novel’s truths rang with a persistent reminder that we must call out the injustices we witness.