The Nickel Boys, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, is a slender volume, clocking in at only two hundred-some pages long. Yet in all the ways that are most important, to me as reader, at least, this novel by Colson Whitehead, author of another Pulitzer-winner, The Underground Railroad, packs a powerful punch. Months after reading, the book continues to impact me.
The Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood Curtis, a sensitive and gifted young black man. Due to a tragic convergence of events in the Jim Crow South, Elwood is unjustly forced attend to Nickel Academy, a reformatory school that advertises itself as a place of edification, where learned teachers and beneficent administrators turn bad boys into fine, upstanding gentleman. What happens inside the place, however, is antithetical to its bright and shiny reputation.
How will young Elwood and the other boys survive this brutal academy, where hard labor more than homework is the norm, and lies, abuse, and punishment prevail over honesty and kindness? If the boys survive, what will happen to them when their time is done, and they are released into the world, broken men? How do the words of Elwood’s beloved Dr. Martin Luther King, "Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you," hold up, as time goes by? Read The Nickel Boys and find out. By the breathtaking and entirely surprising end, you will have experienced a lifetime of emotions, conveyed through a riveting plot, the twists and turns of which yield important and devastating implications, not just about Nickel Academy, which is based on an actual boys' school in Florida that closed its doors for good only recently, but about this country in which we live.