PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. • "One of the most gifted novelists in America today." —NPR Nickel Boys, soon to be a major motion picture directed by Academy Award® nominee RaMell Ross. Coming to Theaters this Fall. When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers and “should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation's best" (Entertainment Weekly). Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!

Nickel Boys is not Underground Railroad. Absent completely is the magical realism of the time-traveling train, the stark horror of the forest or the chase, or the visceral descriptions of the racism and cruelty. In Nickel Boys, all of the horror is subdued, and mostly described as trauma felt after the fact. NUBClub largely liked this shift. Most of the group found Nickel Boys to be a powerful look at another aspect of the civil rights movement -- the struggles of those crushed by its oppression. Essentially, Nickel Boys is a retelling of King's experience in Birmingham jail, but without any of the attention or glory. It looks at how an idealist, Elwood, deals with the oppression and torture of the Nickel Academy, a supposed school that he is imprisoned in falsely, as he tries to maintain his idealism. What is intereting about Nickel Boys is the way that Elwood's journey shows the trials and compromises he must endure in his suffering, stripping away the myth of noble suffering that he naively believed. In his contrast with Turner, the cynic whe befriends him in the academy, we see the different beliefs that guide the teens through their suffering, either thrist for justice or savvy to minimize the harm one receives. What makes the book fascinating are the views of heroism that the book offers -- surviving, helping others in the community, aiding a friend -- alongside the deep residue of trauma and how it continues to shape lives. We had lot of conversations about Elwood's views of the world in his later years, and whether he was right to think the racism and threat of the world hadn't changed or whether he was just incapable of letting go of his own past. But it's important to note that all of this trauma is depicted softly. There are very few scenes of cruelty in the book -- one beating, one tragic story of a murder due to a misunderstanding -- but most of the actual sufferring of the boys is described in a distant and vague way in glimpses of children undernourished or with ringworm, and in the constant threat of a trip to the part of the school you don't return from. A few of us were turned off from the book for this reason. To those few, the book was just too bloodless to have an effect. However, no one could deny the elegance with which Whitehead drew his theme through the book or the power of the core message. It's not the tour de force that Underground Railroad was, but NUBClub agreed it was an excellent, if for some of us unsatisfying, story about what heroism can actually be for oppressed people in an unjust world.