The Nickel Boys

Contains Spoilers!
Netgalley ARC

"Is that what normal husbands do - buy flowers for no reason? All these years out of that school and he still spent a segment of his days trying to decipher the customs of normal people."

A brilliant fictional account of a real scandal: abuse in juvenile detention in the US. Elwood is a bookish boy who is doing well despite his parents leaving him, second rate schooling and Jim Crow.

Given the promotion for the book it comes as no surprise that he is thrown into detention and must try to learn how to survive. He finds that his law abiding, hard working approach which served him so well in school and in a part time job is absolutely no protection within Nickel: being clever is of no interest, the system show more wants the boys cowed and productive (as their labour is highly profitable). Boys are imprisoned for offences that add up to being children, or being poor. One of the reasons the institution can run is the willful ignorance of those outside, who see the boys as unimportant and are happy to benefit from the way the institution is run.

The twist at the end completely got me, I was reassuring myself with the thought that this lovely boy survived such a terrible experience and made it out the other side, and instead was shocked to find that in fact he was another victim in the graveyard.

I was impressed at how Whitehead showed the long term impact of the abuse on the boys as they became adults: it would have been easy to dwell on the physical abuse but he shows the psychological effects as well as the way there is pressure on survivors to "move on" from their experiences. show less

Elwood Curtis is a smart, hard-working kid who should have a very bright future. Unfortunately, though, he is a black man growing up in the Florida panhandle during the early 1960s, where Jim Crow laws, as well as many less obvious biases, create more obstacles than he can handle. After getting caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, he is taken out of his home and sent to a reform school for “rehabilitation”. But the Nickel Academy is hardly interested in educating and reforming students; it is a prison in everything but its name. It also marks the beginning of Elwood’s real education, much of which comes at the hands of a sadistic, corrupt white superintendent and a system that could not care less about his welfare. show more Subjected to beatings, starvation, economic exploitation, and other atrocities, Elwood will struggle to recover from the experience over the rest of his life.

In The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead shares Elwood’s sad saga, as well as those of some of the other students at the school, most notably Jack Turner who becomes a friend and something of a mentor. Without question, this is a brutal, heartbreaking story, with little in the way of hope or redemption offered as solace. What makes it all the more harrowing is the fact that much of the story is true; in the Acknowledgments, the author notes that Nickel is based on the Dozier School for Boys in Florida where many of the incidents the novel chronicles actually occurred. I found that to be simply frightening and it definitely influenced my entire reading experience. Interestingly, Whitehead relates his tale with reasonably flat and matter-of-fact prose (despite an interesting twist near the end), preferring to allow the magnitude of the events speak for themselves. That choice made for a very effective story-telling device.

Given its subject matter, it would be difficult to say that I enjoyed reading this book. However, The Nickel Boys definitely taught me a lot about attitudes and actions in a time and place that, while ostensibly long ago and far away, seem like they could still occur in the here and now. Nevertheless, I was confused about how the author portrayed differences between the black and the white student experiences at the school. Beyond the segregated facilities, Whitehead makes it clear that black students received the worst of everything possible and likely suffered more degradation and physical abuse. This is curious since the Dozier survivor website he recommends to the reader contains the memory of a particularly gruesome whipping written by a white man; this remembrance appears to be the source of the account of the initial beating that Elwood endures. The point is that Nickel/Dozier was simply an evil institution run by vicious and self-serving people, which was true for everyone who had the misfortune to spend time there. show less

Elwood is a well-behaved, smart teenager. He gets good grades in school and has a job at a corner store. He listens to records of Dr. King’s speeches, attends peaceful protests for civil rights, and is starting to take college classes soon. In his excitement to get to class early he hitchhikes, in a car that turns out to be stolen. Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy, a reform school practicing corruption and violence like Elwood has never known before. He’s beaten almost to death for standing up for a smaller student, but months of toeing the line afterward gets him a cushy role selling the tax-dollar-supplied school provisions (only the Black kids’ provisions, of course) to the neighboring townspeople in exchange for cash to line show more the administrators’ pockets.
In the present day, adult Elwood lives in New York City and mostly tries not to think about Nickel, until he hears the news that archaeologists have dug up the many, many bodies buried there.

What a book. Very closely based on the real Dozier School, Whitehead once again writes fiction that is just as real as the truth. The short book feels dense, like every sparse sentence contains a full story in just a few words. Every character feels immediately recognizable, and it especially felt like I understood Elwood deeply from the moment I met him. I was confused how the elder Elwood could be so different from the boy I knew, and then after the twist everything clicked into place.
Every time I read something by Whitehead it just makes me want to read more immediately. show less

The Nickel School (also known as The Florida School for Boys) was a reform school that opened in 1900 and wasn’t entirely disbanded until 2011. For 111 years, this “school” allowed the perpetuation of rape, abuse, and murder. It wasn’t until 2012 that an anthropological study was done at the site and its darkest secrets confirmed. Knowing that The Nickel Boys draws on a true story makes this novel even more haunting.

Whitehead tells the story of Nickel school and the boys who went there through the eyes of Elwood, a fictional character and a Black “student”. Through The Nickel Boys, readers see Elwood’s travails as well as those of his peers and the boys that came before. From the beginning the reader knows it will be a show more harrowing tale when human remains are found in an archaeological dig.

The Nickel Boys manages to be a story about both an individual’s trials to overcome the oppression of a racist institution but also the greater problems of unfair incarceration, the corruption of private institutions, and the unfortunate roles race and class play into both of those. This book will make you angry with the world and sad for the character and angry again. It is another book about Black pain and trauma, but it’s a different shade of that ongoing story and an important perspective to have.

Be prepared to read The Nickel Boys slowly. There are time jumps that may throw the reader off, but each segment and each story is an important slice of the story. More than the writing style or the pacing – both of which are impeccable – The Nickel Boys has heavy themes and the story is devastating. It’s a beautiful, sad, and necessary story to read and one I recommend with all my heart. show less

For a boy in the Florida panhandle of the 1960s there are few escapes, education is one. Elwood is lucky enough to get a place at a college in a town a few miles from home and he hitches a ride. Unfortunately Elwood takes a ride in a stolen car and is arrested for car theft. Sent to a reformatory school Elwood learns how to survive but he wants more and his belief in justice causes no end of problems.
I loved this book. Whitehead evokes the hot Florida panhandle and 1960s segregation beautifully. The gratuitous violence is never overplayed and the twist is actually rather unexpected. A subtle novel of civil rights but a great one.

Colson Whitehead is a wonderful storyteller no matter what genre he selects. This historical fiction is beautifully told and has a surprising twist. In the acknowledgments, Mr. Whitehead reveals that this work of fiction is based on the story of the Dozier School for Boys in Mariana, Florida, whose horrifying history began to be excavated - literally - by archaeology students from the University of South Florida and was exhaustively reported on in The Tampa Bay Times. Its fictional counterpart, Nickel Academy, is a nightmarish place that terrorizes, sodomizes, brutalizes, and sometimes tortures to death its students, run by sadistic brutes, many of them Klansmen. Some find a way out; some never leave alive; the rest live with the scars show more all their lives. Chilling. show less

An emotionally difficult read, this novel was Whitehead's second Pulitzer Prize winner. I am very glad to have read this powerful story. It was wrenching, yes, but not unrelentingly so; it had an affirmative ending, and a sneaky twist that I suspected just a few pages before it was revealed. Dickens's orphans have nothing on the students of the Florida Industrial School for Boys, a/k/a Nickel Academy, a reform school where the slightest departure from the rules can result in beatings, solitary confinement, or a trip "out back" from which there is no return. From the outside, this institution looks serene, well-tended and not at all forbidding. The students perform community service, put on shows which are attended by the public, and an show more annual Christmas fair that draws visitors from across the panhandle of the state. Behind the scenes, there is cruelty and corruption without sanction or consequence to the perpetrators, and the victims are almost exclusively black. The most horrifying part of the story is that it is grounded in fact, and that thousands of young lives were lost or irreparably damaged in the actual school that provided Whitehead's model for Nickel. The real-life institution continued to operate well into the 21st century despite repeated investigations into charges of abuse. show less