The Nickel Boys
Illustration for The Boston Globe review of "The Nickel Boys" Pulitzer-winner Colson Whitehead’s new book, a childhood lost to Jim Crow. The Nickel Academy is a reform school that promises to provide “physical, intellectual and moral training” to transform wayward black boys into honorable men. Instead, it’s a sprawling hellscape where sexual abuse and murder are far more common than reading or mathematics. Inspired by the real story of Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys where earlier this year a forgotten plot of Florida land finally revealed its dreaded secret: a mass graveyard.