A review by books_baking_brews
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

5.0

In 2014, some archaeology students at the University of South Florida discovered some remains of boys who had been raped, tortured, and mutilated and then dumped in a secret grave at the Dozier School for Boys, an all-boys school run by the state. Dozier, which opened in 1900, was finally closed in 2011 but they are still finding buried bodies. This served as inspiration for Whitehead’s, The Nickel Boys. The Nickel Boys picks up with the archeology students and then flints back in time to college-bound Elwood who’s wrongly accused of stealing a car and then as a show of “leniency” gets sentenced to Nickel, the fictionalized version of Dozier. Elwood befriends another student, Turner, who is much more aware of how the world works and the two set about navigating their time at Nickel the best they can. The chapters alternate, sometimes telling the horrors of the school set in the Jim-Crow era south and sometimes set in the future showing that those horrors stick with the boys who managed to get out. This is another pocket-sized book that packs a punch. I would definitely recommend. CW: abuse, rape, and assault.