cbr18bingo
Or (like it says above)
This is the third book from Whitehead that I have read – each one a treat and all so very different. No matter what the subject matter is, he is just a flat out good writer. (The other two were Sag Harbor and Harlem Shuffle, by the way). There is a reason he won two Pulitzers in a row.
Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner are two black teenagers who end up in the reform school Nickel Academy (based on Florida’s Dozier School, a Jim Crow reform school) in the 1960s for very different reasons. Elwood, a gifted student, is on his way to his first classes of college. Unfortunately, he hitches a ride from a car that turns out to be stolen. Turner, on the other hand, justifiably threw a brick into a white man’s car, and is thus convicted. No matter, their lives are the same in the Academy. There aren’t but a few ways out, the best being aging out and being released. But following the rules and good behavior are no protection against being brutally beaten purely on the whim of the staff. Then there is the graveyard, with always room for a few more.
Elwood, who was raised by his stanchly moral grandmother, treasures the memories of a record by Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, as his guiding principle. Turner doesn’t have any equivalent. And as life at Nickel Academy starts twisting their lives apart, choices must be made.
And I gotta say, I did not see that twist at the end coming.
