My Amazon and Goodreads review of The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Rating 5) – The Truth, Push, and Hope of Fiction. Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys would have had hit me regardless, but because I was reading it when yet another African American was murdered by the police, it whipped me as thoroughly as the book’s protagonist was beaten at the Florida reform school that gives the novel its title. Elwood Curtis, the impressionable and idealistic black teenager at the story’s center, tries to hold onto the inspiring words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The pain of his inevitable disillusionment must be buried for him to survive, while it simultaneously acts as an irrepressible force that drives him to achieve and prove his white tormentors wrong. Yet only by confronting his past and calling out the abuse, can the truth literally be unearthed and the seeds of change sown. Whitehead’s writing is unsparing, whether he is probing the minds of his characters or the horrors of the scenes he depicts. What he leaves unsaid is perhaps more vivid than what he says; readers don’t have the option of turning away. As a writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I was in awe of both his courage and his craft. In a time that calls for systemic and collective change, one wants to believe that this fictional account of one individual defying the odds can become a reality for multitudes. Yet, nearly six decades after The Nickel Boys is set, racism’s realities remain devastating. Does Whitehead’s story offer a glimmer of hope? The power of fiction is that it can not only moves us within, but also propel us out onto the streets. The Nickel Boys forces us to ask why we haven’t taken that step, and whether we finally will.
