La Jolla Reads Finale - The Nickel Boys

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La Jolla Riford Library and Warwick's present LA JOLLA READS!  Our local version of "One Book, One San Diego". Every four months we will choose a different title for everyone to enjoy. What a great way to get everyone in the community talking about the same book!  The library has ordered extra copies of The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.  If you find you can’t wait to get your hands on it, Warwick’s is offering 20% off.

Happy reading everyone!

THE NICKEL BOYS

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called The Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men."                                                                                                                  

Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative.

"It shreds our easy confidence in the triumph of goodness and leaves in its place a hard and bitter truth about the ongoing American experiment."

- Ron Charles, The Washington Post

 

 

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