Elwood is a young, black teen set for college classes in the early 1960s. He takes a ride from the wrong person and is sent to a boys reform school.

The Nickel Academy is supposed to smooth away the rough edges of the wayward boys. Instead, it is a segregated nightmare. A camp where youngsters are brutalized, tortured and murdered. A camp where some boys disappear and are never heard from again. A place where all of the boys are mistreated by other boys and the staff but the black teens are treated worse than the white boys.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead writes a haunting, haunted book with “The Nickel Boys.” He based his novel and its fictional Nickel Academy on the brutal history uncovered in recent years after the closing of the real-life Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Fla.

The slim volume packs a heart-breaking punch with unexpected twists. Whitehead tells the stories of these boys in an almost episodic manner, chapter by chapter, with fast-forwards to Elwood in the future.

He also writes with his eloquent power, an author who has always been good – from the early “John Henry Days” with its mix of legend and modern life to “Zone One” set in a zombie-filled apocalypse to the book that won him the Pulitzer “The Underground Railroad” which imagined the slave-escape route as an actual underground railroad – but seems to get better with each novel. 

“The Nickel Boys” is a book that sticks with readers, a book that tears at the soul, fills a reader with righteous anger and concludes with an almost breathless shock. The feeling lingers like mourning young lives lost, like the snuffing out of potential, youth and dreams.