The Nickel Boys

This is a short read, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth you’re time. It’s an interesting mix of fiction and non-fiction - the school in the book is based on one in real life, and some of the quotes from the book come from people who actually went to that school.

“School” is a very generous term for what this book is about. It follows Elwood Curtis, a kid about to go to college who is wrongfully convicted of car theft, and sent to The Nickel Academy in Florida. Elwood is an optimistic follower of Martin Luther King Jr. and sometimes struggles with putting King’s speeches and writings into practice in the real world. His main friend in the Academy is Jack Turner, who goes by Turner, and has, to Turner, a more realistic viewpoint. The Nickel Academy is a “school” but really it’s juvenile detention or a “reform school”. Together, they deal with daily racial injustices that come with the living in the South during the Civil Rights movement. I think Whitehead does a really good job of presenting this book - and this is going to sound weird - in a subtle way. Yes the injustices he writes about are obvious and devastating, but since the book is so short there’s almost no time for him to wax poetic about how horrible they were. They just were, and that might make them even worse.

Turner and Elwood are two sides of the same coin, and Whitehead even says this. They represent optimism and cynicism, and since this is such a short book, there isn’t a ton of time to totally flesh out these characters. While I would’ve liked a little more about them, in an allegorical sense they work really well, especially in the last chapter. The mixing of the two sides of the coin worked really well I thought, even if it was a bit obvious (If you read the book this will make sense). Really, the last half of the book engaged me more than the first half. The first section really felt like a lot of setup, using certain tropes to get the reader orientated, and there was a lot of payoff in the second half that I was a lot more interested in, which is why the length of the book is one of the strengths I’ve been harping on.

Overall, this story is more hopeful than I thought it would be, but also more heartbreaking. It’s about a lot of things like innocence, learning, improving, not to mention the spotlight it shines on racial injustice, even to this day. It works both as a work of fiction - the story is engaging and emotional, but I would argue it works even better as an allegory about the Civil Right’s movement as a whole. It simultaneously says: “we can make the world a better place if we keep working at it,” and, “this country is founded on genocide, murder, and slavery and it will always be that way,” and lets the reader come to their own conclusion. Of course, the last chapter is Whitehead’s own conclusion, and I think it’s hard to beat what he wrote. So congrats on you’re Pulitzer, Mr. Whitehead, but today you’ve received and even greater award - I’m giving your book the Thomas Recommends badge.