The Nickel Boys

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, 224 pages.

Due to be released in July of 2019, Whitehead uses his prodigious talent to tell the story of Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, two young black men caught up in a hellish parody of justice in the Jim Crow South, both of them remanded to the Nickel Academy, a Florida juvenile reformatory. Elwood accepted a ride in a stolen car on his way to his first college class. That was his crime, and for that he finds himself sentenced to Nickel, where he suffers through severe beatings and daily encounters with sadistic adults. A firm believer in the teachings of Dr Martin Luther King, Elwood must decide how far he can allow his principles to bend without allowing them to break, how much hate he can answer with love. Elwood, Turner, and the other boys must try to survive and find their way to one of the four paths out of Nickel.