Last week I talked about how I felt Furious Hours by Casey Cep was one of the best books I read last year. Nickel Boys is also a strong contender. It is a fictionalised account of what happened in a real school in the states.
Nickel is the name of the Nickel Academy, a reform school for boys, and the story follows Elwood Curtis who is a black teenager growing up in the 1960s. An innocent mistake leaves him as a pupil at the Nickel Academy and we see the horrors through his eyes.
There is a grittiness to this book that is hard to come to terms with. The subject is handled well, and doesn’t dwell on graphic details, but in no way does it downplay the brutality of what happened.
I was taken by surprise by the way the book ended, but that was one of the features that made this such an impactful read. I highly recommend it but it’s not for the fainthearted.
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