Today’s blog is a review of The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. I’ve decided to add a new feature to my blog—reviews of historical novels—to get more variety and some new types of posts.
The Nickel Boys is Whitehead’s follow-up to The Underground Railroad. It has earned nearly 2,000 reviews on Amazon so far, most of them quite complementary, so I decided to give it a read. Elwood is the main character. He’s a high school student, an African American, who is about to start college classes when he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time and convicted of a crime. A well-worn plot device, I suppose, I’ve used it myself in my Clarence Duval Series, but a plausible one considering Elwood is a young black man in 1960s Florida.
Elwood’s sentence is to attend the Nickel School, a reform school for boys. Except, there is little focus on reform—Nickel is a hellish pit that terrorizes its wards in every way imaginable but gilds over its sins whenever outsiders are on the grounds. Anyone who steps out of line gets beaten into submission, or worse, regardless of age. I’ll leave the plot right there, so as not to give away too much, but suffice it to say Elwood makes plans that will put him in danger before his sentence is up.
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Subtlety in The Nickel Boys
The Nickel Boys is a historical novel in the sense that it refers to an event that happened historically, but most of the history is in the setting. In this regard, Whitehead gives an okay performance. There are a few cultural references, Martin Luther King, Jr., plays a role in the plot through his speeches, and the reader finds the types of corruption one would expect in a largely unregulated reform school run by the Good Ole Boy network. In fact, there were several subtle references to various events in African American history that were well-placed. Unfortunately, many of these were subtle and lacked elaboration, so that the only people who will catch them are people who lived through the 1960s as adults or students of African American history. I enjoyed them, but most readers won’t notice or appreciate them fully.
The writing itself was, for lack of a better word, annoying at times. Sentence fragments. So many. Choppy writing. Perhaps that was Whitehead’s effort to portray the fractured thoughts and memories produced by a place like Nickel, but it didn’t impress me. I also found the last few chapters, where the story races ahead in time and then goes back, disruptive. Finally, there were also places that told the reader how parts of the story would come out later. Not helpful.
That said, I do take my hat off to the author for his choice of plots. The Nickel Boys has a really good story at its center, and one that’s important to bring to light. In that respect, it’s much like my own books Darkness in Dixie and The Buffalo Soldier. The ending had a few unexpected surprises, too.
All this adds up to a mixed review for me. I enjoyed The Nickel Boys at times, but at others I was just hoping to get it over with. I’ll give it 7 points out of 10.
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