Written by Colson Whitehead

This book is hard to read, as it tells the story of two young boys who are sent to a terrifying reform school that is based on a real school that operated in Florida for over a hundred years. The school purports to instill “physical, intellectual, and moral training,” but in reality uses brutal tactics to keep the boys in line, including ruthless beatings, whippings, sexual assaults, solitary confinements, and “disappearances.”  The narrator says of the young boy Elwood’s time in solitary confinement at Nickel: “The worst thing that ever happened to Elwood happened every day: He woke in that room.”

Despite the grisly environment of the school and what happens to him there, Elwood remains hopeful, guided by Martin Luther King’s principles and words. He believes “There are people who trick you and deliver emptiness with a smile, while others rob you of your self-respect. You need to remember who you are.” Elwood is a responsible youth who gets caught up innocently with a bad egg and is sent to The Nickel Academy where he must learn to survive the sick tactics of a sadistic staff.

The book is beautifully written with surprising turns of figurative language (“Ishmael was a man of secret menace who stored up menace like a battery,” and “The record went around and around, like an argument that always returned to its unassailable premise”). And the friendships that are instilled among the “brotherhood of broken boys” are unforgettable, principally between the two friends, idealistic Elwood and skeptical Turner, and the surprising twist of fate toward which they hurtle in this gruesome page-turner.