The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Colson Whitehead is a talented writer able to craft stunning prose reminiscent of James Baldwin. The Nickel Boys is no exception in terms of pure writing talent it deserves a five. Overall I’ve rounded down from a 3.5 to 3.
Why did I rate it a 3.5? There was a distance between my experience as a reader and the characters of this book. His last book, The Underground Railroad, covered the pains of each character through compelling descriptions and scenes. Not so with The Nickel Boys. The characters experience several traumatizing events, however, each encounter glosses over instead of finds the deeper emotions. While I do not need it to linger on these scenes, the lack of depth made the whole experience feel ungrounded. Perhaps Mr. Whitehead used this distance to set the tone of the story. As the story is recounted from 2014 this distance could convey the hazy nature of memories as time goes on.
While conceptually I understood the danger the characters faced and the hopeless of the Catch-22 situations they ended up in I didn’t feel for the characters as I thought I would when beginning the novel. The emotional distance from the characters ends up making the book simmer rather than sizzle.
Colston does a marvelous job of giving insight into the racism experienced by African American communities both in the mid-60s and then how that translates to the modern-day. The descriptions of the communities were the best part of the book for me.
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