Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was a fan of Colson Whitehead's last book The Underground Railroad. It was a very difficult read but a very good story. This book echoes that sentiment. It wasn't an easy read due to the subject matter but it was a very good story. Whitehead does an amazing job of developing the main character, Elwood Curtis. For some, they could probably remember the events that took place during the time frame of the book. Elwood's story begins in 1962 and he obsessively listens to a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. record over and over. He admires the civil rights movement leaders and mentions several key events in history. Whitehead does a great job of introducing Jim Crow era experiences to those like myself who could never imagine experiences as such. In my opinion, the best historical fiction is drawn from true stories and this was no exception. In Whitehead's previous novel, he introduces the story of a slave in the south and in this novel, he introduces a segregated reform school and the horrors that ensued within. I would recommend this book to those who were drawn to the writing of Whitehead either in "Underground Railroad" or prior. Fans of historical fiction should definitely read this and honestly, I think most Americans should read this because it is a story that isn't told often at all. Powerful and sticks with you long after finishing this short novel.

"The capacity to suffer. Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap?”

“Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom. Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers is the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains. A term in an iron sweatbox, cooking his brains in the sun, had a way of bringing a buck around, and so did a dark cell, a room aloft in darkness, outside time.”

“Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.”
Elwood Curtis from Tallahassee, Frenchtown.
As a young man he carried himself differently than other peers from his community, industrious and had a steady nature.
Started his keen interest in reading with comics, including ones like Hardy Boys, The Crypt of Terror and The Vault of Horror, he progressed to encyclopaedias and Life magazine in his new job, a magazine that exposed him to more real tales of horror and the rights struggle, he would listen to recordings of Reverend King’s speeches.

A great man was taking form in the heart of a young man, in this poignant stark tale of courage and endurance, Elwood, one well read, heart at conflict with all the inequality around, forging forward, standing up, conscious and heart moving toward a path an active movement forward for rights and equality in an unequal word and place of residence The Nickel.
He wanted people and his race to stand up for themselves, fate threw tragedy in his path in this tale and the journey and road memorable and never to be forgotten.

A pursuit of happiness against the injustices and terrors, a soul finding some ground, strength, courage and voice with important passages containing American terrible horrors and histories, stark realities in time gone and time present.

Colson Whitehead creating a stark continuous dream and nightmare within the reader with Elwood Curtis and The Nickel Boys, Elwood with all that ambition and hope, intelligence and courage, grit and resilience.

While not as captivating as The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys grows on you after you read it. It's a compelling story, and there are no happy endings here.

Colson Whitehead has this incredible gift of being a master storyteller. I am confident he will go down as one of the most prolific writers of our generation. He has this way with words to immerse the reader so deeply where one can feel the emotions Mr. Whitehead must have felt as he was writing. I was not sure what to think when I picked up this book as I was warned it included some abuse and sexual abuse and to be honest I wasn't sure if this book would be as great of a follow up as The Underground Railroad but this book ticked all of my boxes. It exposed me to a world greatly different than my own and taught me about a topic I new nothing about. While there were some scenes that I felt were more descriptive than I would have preferred, this novel is a true gem. I look forward to seeing how far this book goes and what the author brings us in the future.

I became so attached to the main character that, at times, I hesitated to turn the page for fear of something bad happening to him. The author handles the horrid circumstances of this reformatory school with restraint without glossing over the terrible activities that occurred there. The writing is perfectly tuned to the times. The quotes from Dr. M.L. King were powerful in this novel's setting and are just as powerful to reflect on today. Man's inhumanity to man is always such terrible thing to think about. Yet, somehow, the novel manages to end on a hopeful note.

Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the ARC to read and review.

This book was based on the events at the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school for boys where beatings, torture, rape were a regular occurance, and death was the ultimate punishment.

In Colson Whitehead’s novel, the story centers around two friends, Elwood and Turner. Elwood and Turner are very different. Elwood believes in the dream of the civil rights movement, standing up for injustices, fairness and change in the face of Jim Crow. He had a family that included his grandmother and community. He had goals and was going to college. Turner though, had no family, and is a cynic He’s seen it all, and this is his second stint at nickel. Despite their continued differences, the two become friends. Turner takes Elwood under his wing, showing how to navigate Nickel and avoid trouble. While under Turner’s wing, Elwood remains unchanged. This is despite the circumstances that landed him at Nickel and despite what he sees happening at Nickel.

I am torn between describing Elwood as an optimist or just incredibly naive. I settled for naive. He believed so much in Dr. King and the civil rights movement, but it didn’t appear he fully understood the realities of Jim Crow even as he became a victim of those justices Turner was a great counter to Elwood. Their dueling views made them complementary characters.

I was familiar with the story of the Dozier School for Boys before I began reading this book. Yet for me, this book was a tough read because while the story of Nickel is fiction, the events that occurred throughout this book, were some young boys’ reality, and that is tragic. This was my first book by Whitehead. He does an amazing job painting a picture without getting graphic. I won’t give anything away, but I was taken by surprise by ending, which speaks to the job that Whitehead does with this novel. I was very happy to receive this as ARC and definitely recommend.

Truly an incredible piece of writing. This book delivers gutpunch after gutpunch, made all the worse for knowing that while the story is fictional, the horrors are drawn from real life. It may take place in the era of Jim Crow and segregation, but it's all too relevant to today and Whitehead does an excellent job of drawing those comparisons.

The Nickel Boys is a harrowing look at the trauma of justice under Jim Crow as told through the fictional experiences of two young men sentenced to juvenile detention at the Nickel Academy, a fictional stand-in for the real life Dozier School for Boys in Florida. The Nickel Boys are admitted for crimes of malingering, mopery, and incorrigibility, just as the generations before them had served time for vagrancy, changing employers without permission, and “bumptious contact,” i.e. bumping into a white person or failing to step off the sidewalk to let a white person pass.

The goal at Nickel Academy is to earn points and status rank, the rulebook for which no one had ever seen because, “like justice, it existed in theory.” Achieving status would mean the interred might get discharged, fully “reformed,” rather than end up in an unmarked grave on the property.

The beatings are senseless and violent. Boys disappear in the middle of the night, never to be seen again (until students from the University of South Florida exhume their unmarked graves many years later).

One will make it out and live to tell the tale; he’ll even go on to subconsciously name his business after the highest-level status rank could achieve at Nickel, the level that got you out of the academy: “Ace: out in the free world to make your zigzag way.” As characters, Elwood represents the strain of thought that believes social change is possible, that humans can aspire to and achieve a higher purpose together, while Turner, grounded in this world, understands it is dumb and mean and one must learn to navigate that.

Does the moral arc of the universe bend towards justice? Whitehead doesn't take a side in the telling of this story, leaving the reader a lot to chew on.

A horrifying yet restrained story of a boy's reform school in the Civil Rights era. Elwood and Turner help each other navigate the colored campus of a notorious boys' school where scamps and petty criminals find themselves locked up until they serve out their sentence, turn 18, get promoted to "Ace" for good behavior or run away. The fate of those who have attempted to run are grisly and recounted by the staff as warnings. Grim warnings also trickle in from other boys about the "white house" and "out back". Turner is quickly working his way up through the ranks counting on being promoted to Ace despite the fact this is his second stint at Nickel whereas Elwood, inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr. sets himself up to make change on a grander scale. Though well-defined, I was expecting the characters to come to life even more brutally and painfully than they did, but then again, this is a novel constrained by truth. The White House was an actual macabre feature at a boys' school in Florida. The survivors have come together online and are the inspiration for this unflinching novel about race, brutality, and resilience.

Heartbreaking novel based on a real life ‘school’ for boys. Boys, both black and white, were abused, beaten, traumatized. Some survived, some didn’t. A gripping story that is hard to put down, but also devastating to read. A must-read, a painful look at the past and present.

I am still reeling after reading Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys—a work of fiction inspired by the story of the Dozier School for Boys that survived for 111 years in Marianna, Florida, and damaged more than 1,000 boys at best estimate.

College-bound protagonist Elwood Curtis’ dreams are dashed when an innocent blunder leads him to The Nickel Academy, the fictional remake of Dozier, which does very little if anything to “reform” the boys but, instead, crushes more than their dreams. The “voices” of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin offer a bit of hope for Elwood until their wisdom is whacked away by the deplorable conditions and brutal treatment. In fact, it is in the novel’s Jim Crow 1960s setting that Elwood and other black boys, as in real life, receive horrendous treatment: bullying, beatings, emotional abuse, sexual violation, slave-type labor, food deprivation, substandard education, inferior housing, and a lack of the basic needs for cleanliness. Death at the hands of the staff is the only reprieve for many of the boys who are buried in unmarked graves and whose families are never truthfully informed of the cause of death. Many parents are even led to believe that their son just ran away from the facility.

The dramatic plot twists in this novel are riveting, and the writing is some of Whitehead’s best.

Highly recommended!

This review also appears on Goodreads under the pseudonym "Writing Soul."

Colson Whitehead has done it again. Each sentence resonates with resolve, anger, truth and also love. The systematic oppression of Black Americans is on display in this book, as well as the lasting effect of trauma on boys undeserving of such treatment. Rage and violence are the norm, but shreds of dignity remain as one man tries to live a better life despite his torment.

Editor's note: Upon receiving a final copy of "The Nickel Boys," a review of this novel will appear at Mountain Times (Boone, N.C.)

As with Colson Whitehead's 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Underground Railroad," the past is prologue in this follow-up to that novel, "The Nickel Boys."
But just as certain in this important and impressive work, prologue is past ... and present and future.
"No one believed them until someone else said it," Colson writes in the opening of his seventh work of fiction.
Left unsaid: Like so much else.
The horrors of sexual and physical abuse at this boys' reformatory have been dramatized by Colson here, but they are based on a real institution and also left unsaid — because, horribly, it doesn't need to be said — is that this institution is not alone in its history of transforming boys into bitter and damaged men.
Our hero is an exception, a Nickel Boy "who went by the name of Elwood Curtis," a man who wrestles with his demons but has managed as an adult to start and run a successful business, and more impressively, start and manage a successful relationship.
Colson isn't known for withholding a punch and he holds back none here. While the novel doesn't reach the Pulitzer quality of "Underground Railroad," it comes damn close in relating the stories of those damned and subjected to the unforgiving evil of a penal institution for youths.
In this tale of sadism and barbarity, where men who are entrusted with reform and care "stored up violence like a battery," Colson takes his readers on another important journey — one in which the view is dark but not distant, and one which portends a future we are wont to repeat if no one cares to look.

A reflection on how easily and unjustly a life of promise could be snuffed out as recently as the 1960s. It is not sensationalized, but reported. The format of the book worked well.

A boys’ reform school in Florida is at the heart of this novel, based on a very real school that existed there. It took me much longer to read this book than it should have. It packs a gut punch to anyone with a conscience and was impossible to read at bedtime. Should everyone read it? Absolutely. Just be ready to process another look at how our society systematically robs young men of any promise they might have.

Colson Whitehead masterfully brings to life a little-known piece of American history in the Jim Crow south. Based on true events at the Dozier School for Boys, which came to light after archaeology students from the University of South Florida discovered a secret graveyard full of the dumped bodies of unremembered boys, the horror is how clearly this story shows that Jim Crow is not limited to the distant past: it is set in 1963, and the school didn't close until after the turn of the 21st century.
Elwood and Turner are fully developed characters. I appreciated the significance of the quiet cover of the book, which doesn't become fully apparent until the end of the story.

We realize as we get older that what we don't get taught about in school is endless. This novel is eye-opening to the Jim Crow era and what it really was. It has been reduced to different water fountains and sitting in the back of the bus when really it was terrorism, humiliation, and inhumane.
At this moment in time, the issue of reparations for black people is back in the news and on the Capitol floor. This book, and the nonfiction work that Whitehead references at the end, are reasons why reparations are necessary. Way too often white people try to tell black people that things have been over and equal since slavery ended and to get over it. This novel powerfully tells the story of Elwood and other boys at the Nickel Reform School and what life was like in the recent past, and what it is still like now. This novel introduces you to these boys and makes you care for them and love them. Now that I have read this novel, I want to educate myself even more.

Based on the actual events that occurred at a Florida boys reform school during the Jim Crow era, Whitehead’s latest is a powerful testament to the pervasive evils of racism long after the abolishment of slavery, as well as the strength and perseverance of those boys who survived and went on to tell their stories. I found the wording to be a bit clunky at times, but this did not detract from the overall message of a story that was desperately waiting to be told.

Many thanks to Netgalley, Doubleday and Colson Whitehead for my complimentary e-copy ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

A devastating fictionalized account of a grim corner of American history, from the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award- winning author of The Underground Railroad. The matter-of-fact style of the deeply intelligent narrator belies the horrors of his experience in a “reform school” for young black men in 1950s Florida.

Oh my. This was excellent but absolutely heartbreaking. This book is very well written and very important... but... . it is HEAVY. My heart hurts.