“Two boys at the segregated Nickel Academy reform school in 1960s Florida, based on the real Dozier School. Pulitzer Prize 2020.”
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
The Nickel Boys is Colson Whitehead's 2019 novel, the Pulitzer Prize winner and Whitehead's second consecutive Pulitzer after The Underground Railroad (2017). The setting is the Nickel Academy, a fictionalized version of the real Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, which operated from 1900 to 2011 and where investigators in the 2010s discovered the remains of more than fifty boys in unmarked graves. Elwood Curtis, a bright Black teenager in 1962 Tallahassee with college plans, hitches a ride with a stranger one Sunday on his way to a Saturday morning college course and is arrested as an accomplice when the driver turns out to be in a stolen car. Elwood is sent to Nickel. The novel is what happens to him and to his friend Turner there.
Whitehead's structural method is the patient pairing of Elwood (idealistic, MLK-influenced, committed to the principle of moral reform from within an unjust system) and Turner (skeptical, survival-focused, committed to the principle that the only way out of an unjust system is to escape it). The Dozier School historical material is treated with the moral seriousness that the genuine historical record requires; the novel never sensationalizes the violence and never aestheticizes it. The third-act reveal about Elwood and Turner's relationship is one of the cleanest structural pivots in contemporary American literary fiction.
Recommended as required twenty-first century American literary fiction reading, as the natural next read for readers of The Underground Railroad, and as a primary text in any contemporary American literature course. The 2024 RaMell Ross film is one of the strongest literary-fiction screen adaptations in recent memory. JD Jackson's audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
Related reads
If you liked The Nickel Boys
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 2016 review. Cora, a slave on a Georgia plantation, escapes north via an actual underground railroad, a literalized version of the metaphor. Pulitzer Prize 2017 and the National Book Award winner that defined the contemporary Black literary moment.
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 2016 review. Cora, an enslaved woman, escapes a Georgia plantation by riding an actual subterranean rail network. Pulitzer Prize 2017 and the National Book Award winner.
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1985 review. A nameless teenager joins a band of Indian-hunters along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849. The most violent American novel of the late twentieth century and the rare McCarthy book that demands the prose attention it requires.
Bring Up the Bodies
by Hilary Mantel
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel 2012 review. Thomas Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn and the rise of Jane Seymour. Booker Prize 2012, the second volume of the Cromwell trilogy, and the rare novel that exceeds an already-canonical predecessor.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride 2023 review. A 1972 skeleton found at the bottom of a Pottstown, Pennsylvania well sends the novel back to a 1930s neighborhood where Black, Jewish, and immigrant families lived alongside each other. The most important American novel of 2023.
More by this author