This sometimes harrowing expose of cruelty and abuse in a Florida reform school won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Elwood Curtis is a conscientious and intelligent young man. He studies hard at school and works hard at his part-time job. But he is black and this is Florida in the early 1960s. He is arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school. He has to learn how to survive in a brutal environment where the rules are made by the abusers.
We also meet Elwood Curtis as an older man. He has survived Nickel and now lives in New York. Journalists have exposing the truth about what happened at Nickel.
And there is a twist.
Irony is deeply embedded in this beautifully written and compelling read, from the merely comic “Cherry, a mulatto who took up boxing as a matter of pedagogy, to teach others how not to speak about his white mother.” (Ch 9) to the deeply political: the house where the boys are beaten nearly to death is called the "White House"; what is outside the jail is called the "free world" in the way that the USA calls itself the 'leader of the free world' although even outside the jail the black boys, poor and persecuted, have very little freedom.
An tender and angry portrait of “the infinite brotherhood of broken boys.” (Ch 15)
Selected quotes:
First published in the UK by Fleet in 2019
My paperback edition issued in 2020.
- “He’d outgrown his shirt and the pressure against the buttons made him look upholstered.” (Ch 4)
- “He was familiar with Elwood's ‘situation’ - his intonation swaddled the word in euphemism.” (Ch 4)
- “Stuffing dribbled from the couches and armchairs in the recreation room.” (Ch 4)
- “The first thing Elwood noticed was the notch in the boy's left ear, like on an alley cat that had been in scrapes.” (Ch 5): Elwood’s first view of Turner.
- “He had the screwed-down smile of the rickety-toothed.” (Ch 5)
- “Horror comics, he’d noticed, delivered two kinds of punishment - completely undeserved, and sinister justice for the wicked.” (Ch 7)
- “Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.” (Ch 8)
- “The boy struggled over two plus three, like he didn't know how many damned fingers he had on his hand.” (Ch 9)
- “Out in the Free World to make your zig zag way.” (Ch 11)
- “The White House got a new coat. No one saw who did it. One day it was its dingy self, the next it made the sun vibrate on eyeballs.” (Ch 14)
- “Mr Betts paid on time, in cash, off the books. Didn’t matter what his name was or where he’d come from.” (Ch 15)
- “The worst thing that ever happened to Elwood happened every day: He woke in that room.” (Ch 16)
- “The world had whispered its rule to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead to deliverance, fight and things will change.” (Ch 16)
- “Elwood’s arms went wide’ hands out, as if testing the solidity pf the walls of a long corridor, one he had travelled through for a long time and which possessed no visible terminus.” (Ch 16)
- “She took his head into her lap as he wept, running her thumb over that stray-cat notch in his ear. The scar she never noticed but was right in front of her.” (Epilogue)
First published in the UK by Fleet in 2019
My paperback edition issued in 2020.
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