The Nickel Boys

In this week’s edition of “I’ve been living under a rock and finally read a book everybody else read last year,” I want to talk about THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead. If you somehow missed the hubbub around this Pulitzer Prize winner in 2019, I would urge you to pick up this (only 200 page!) story of two boys struggling to survive in juvenile reformatory school in 1960s Florida. Whitehead manages to craft a tale that is both a history lesson and an intricate character piece. It’s a dark story, and I did cry a whole lot when I finished it, but it’s also an incredibly important story that we all should know more about. 

—Julia Hammer, Creative Executive