The Nickel Boys (Paperback)

Staff Reviews

Colson Whitehead takes the shameful events of the past and forces us to examine them through a microscope. Such is the case with The Nickel Boys, and it’s hard to look. Being raised by his grandmother and getting ready to go to a local college, a young black boy, Elwood Curtis, is wrongly accused of a crime. He is sentenced to hell in the form of Nickel Academy. The psychological and physical abuse of Curtis and his fellow “students" was beyond anything I could imagine—something out of a Stephen King novel. Set in the 60’s, the novel drives home the fact that some things haven’t changed much, including the unfair suspicion and incarceration of young black men, our system of creating hardened criminals instead of rehabilitating them, and the public’s ability to turn a blind eye to injustice. This is an important, if difficult, read.