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jhbandcats 's review for:
The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is the kind of book that makes you feel like you’ve been slammed up against a wall. It’s based on the real history of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, which closed only in 2011 despite being cited for violations for more than a hundred years. These are rhetorical questions: How can this have happened? How can Native Americans have been subjected to the same when the children were forcibly removed from their parents to be taught how to be white? How can the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland have perpetrated the same level of misery on teenage girls for a hundred years? How can so many children have been sexually abused by Catholic clergy for literally centuries? Why do we turn a blind eye to the wrongs for so, so long?
The book is excellent, most of it told in the period when the boys were in the Nickel School, the rest told by one of the boys as an adult looking back on that time. The awfulness is devastating. What’s even more devastating is that it was allowed to flourish despite all evidence of cruelty and violence and that the perpetrators escaped justice.
I tried reading this a few years ago but couldn’t bear to read about these terrible experiences. It’s a short book but it packs so much emotion, history, pain, fury, frustration into its pages. It’s powerful and well worth the Pulitzer that it won.
My only quibble is that pre-Nickel Elwood is portrayed as practically a saint. He doesn’t quite seem real. It’s only after he gets put away that he became real to me.
The book is excellent, most of it told in the period when the boys were in the Nickel School, the rest told by one of the boys as an adult looking back on that time. The awfulness is devastating. What’s even more devastating is that it was allowed to flourish despite all evidence of cruelty and violence and that the perpetrators escaped justice.
I tried reading this a few years ago but couldn’t bear to read about these terrible experiences. It’s a short book but it packs so much emotion, history, pain, fury, frustration into its pages. It’s powerful and well worth the Pulitzer that it won.
My only quibble is that pre-Nickel Elwood is portrayed as practically a saint. He doesn’t quite seem real. It’s only after he gets put away that he became real to me.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Drug use, Gore, Mental illness, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Slavery, Torture, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Blood, Grief, Medical trauma, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Abandonment, Alcohol, Injury/Injury detail, Classism