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BOOKS I READ: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (2019). The Nickel Academy is a segregated reform school for wayward boys, juvi instead of prison. The story begins after Nickel is shut down. A forensic investigation is underway, uncovering its brutal history, something Elwood Curtis, now living in Manhattan, knows all too well. That the goody-two-shoes Elwood was in Nickel in the first place is an injustice glossed over as another “that’s just they way things were” in the early 1960s. His friend Turner helps him get a cushy assignment after he is beaten raw for standing up for another boy. The new detail takes them out among the townsfolk of Eleanor, Florida, and where Elwood, witnessing the prejudice and evil of the world, begins to document the embezzlement of goods meant for the boys. He thinks his letter in the right hands will close down the school. Turner thinks he is nuts. The twist at the end is most unexpected.
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