The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
Having read it
★★★★★
A really good read that, as Barack Obama is quoted as saying it’s ‘A necessary read’.
With its steady pace and, it being fiction following by real events, it subtly asks questions and challenges perceptions of its readers and builds to an ending that makes it a fully justified Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction.
A good passage
The white boys bruised differently than the black boys and called it the Ice Cream Factory because you came out with bruises of every colour. The black boys called it the White House because that was its official name and it fit and didn’t need to be embellished. The White House delivered the law and everybody obeyed.
A second good passage
The law was one thing – you can march and wave sounds around and change a law if you convinced enough white people. In Tampa, Turner saw the college kids with their nice shirts and ties sit in at the Woolworths. He had to work, but they were out protesting. And it happened – they opened the counter. Turner didn’t have the money to eat there either way. You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell – half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends – but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin colour. It was Spencer. It was Spencer and it was Griff and it was all the parents who let their children wind up here. It was people.