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The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
- A Novel
- Narrated by: JD Jackson, Colson Whitehead
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's summary
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. • "One of the most gifted novelists in America today." —NPR
When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.
Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers and “should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation's best" (Entertainment Weekly).
Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
Interview: Colson Whitehead shares why he was called to examine the horrific activities in one Florida reform school through the eyes of a young black boy in his follow-up to the award-winning Underground Railroad.
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Critic reviews
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION • New York Times Bestseller • Longlisted for The National Book Award • Winner of The Kirkus Prize • Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction • One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of the Year
"A necessary read." —President Barack Obama
"This is a powerful book by one of America's great writers. . . . Without sentimentality, in as intense and finely crafted a book as you'll ever read, Whitehead tells a story of American history that won’t allow you to see the country in the same way again." —Toronto Star
"Colson Whitehead continues to make a classic American genre his own. . . . The narration is disciplined and the sentences plain and sturdy, oars cutting into water. Every chapter hits its marks. . . . Whitehead comports himself with gravity and care, the steward of painful, suppressed histories; his choices on the page can feel as much ethical as aesthetic. The ordinary language, the clear pane of his prose, lets the stories speak for themselves. . . . Whitehead has written novels of horror and apocalypse; nothing touches the grimness of the real stories he conveys here" —The New York Times
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If you like well-written novels that prioritize compelling timely storylines with artful prose and structure, then this is the genre for you. So, why is it called "contemporary"? Because it’s fiction set in the real world, in times contemporary to the date it was published, and the stories deal with real-world issues. Representing a diversity of backgrounds and nationalities, here are our picks for the best writers of contemporary fiction over the last 50 years.
Editor's Pick
He’s done it again
"Nobody does historical fiction like Colson Whitehead. His Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Underground Railroad knocked us all out in 2016 and I’m pretty sure The Nickel Boys is on that same trajectory. Based on a real reformatory school and set in the last years of Jim Crow, this story focuses on Elwood Curtis, a young black man trying to survive the horrors that go on within the grounds of The Nickel Academy—an institution more akin to a torturous prison than the academic institution it’s been advertised as. What keeps him going? The words of his hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a belief that it will get better. The Nickel Boys is a beautiful and devastating story that gives a voice to the boys who were abused and killed at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys all those years ago."
—Aaron S., Audible Editor
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- Length: 15 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till's lynching. Before then, she had "known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was…the fear of being killed just because I was black." In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life.
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A Gripping, Visceral Account of 1960's Reality
- By Philomena on 01-03-13
By: Anne Moody
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The Folded Leaf
- By: William Maxwell
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Here is a classic novel from one of our most honored writers - the author of such acclaimed works as So Long, See You Tomorrow and All the Days and Nights. The Folded Leaf is the serenely observed yet deeply moving story of two boys finding one another in the Midwest of the 1920s, when childhood lasted longer than it does today and even adults were more innocent of what life could bring.
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Midwestern Misfits
- By David on 03-17-15
By: William Maxwell
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A Mighty Long Way
- My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
- By: Carlotta Walls Lanier
- Narrated by: Peter Fernandez, Lizan Mitchell
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1951, Carlotta Walls Lanier was one of the nine African-American students to integrate Little Rock High School, and the first to earn a diploma. Here she provides a firsthand account of her experiences - including the bombing that rocked her home, the constant threats she and her classmates faced, and the pressure and bullying her parents endured.
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Very insightful book
- By karen feek on 01-05-21
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Lone Stars
- By: Justin Deabler
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term.
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Read for bookclub but fell in Love
- By Ericka Lawson on 09-11-22
By: Justin Deabler
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The Residue Years
- By: Mitchell S. Jackson
- Narrated by: Corey Allen
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America’s whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the ’90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that’s nothing less than extraordinary. The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace.
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Dense in cultural details
- By Angel on 12-04-15
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Black Boy
- By: Richard Wright
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Richard Wright's powerful and eloquent memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance - a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate.
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Outstanding
- By Trevin Harvey on 11-11-20
By: Richard Wright
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Chasing Me to My Grave
- An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South
- By: Winfred Rembert, Erin I. Kelly, Bryan Stevenson - foreword
- Narrated by: Dion Graham, Karen Chilton
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the civil rights movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of 51 and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.
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Remarkable Memoir, Both Beautiful and Brutal
- By Peter Haas on 10-21-21
By: Winfred Rembert, and others
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Nine Lives
- Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans
- By: Dan Baum
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Nines Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of nine unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings this kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.
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Do not miss if you're interested in New Orleans
- By Kelly on 03-22-18
By: Dan Baum
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Junkie Love
- By: Joe Clifford
- Narrated by: Timothy McKean
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the cow fields of Connecticut to the streets of San Francisco, Joe Clifford's Junkie Love traverses the lost highways of America, down the rocky roads of mental illness to the dead ends of addiction. Based on Clifford's own harrowing experience with drugs as a rock 'n' roll wannabe in the 1990s, the audiobook draws on the best of Kerouac and the Beats, injecting a heavy dose of pulp fiction as it threads a rollicking narrative through a doomed love triangle, lit up by the many strange characters he meets along the way.
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WOW! an inside look into an junkies mind
- By TinkerMel on 05-16-17
By: Joe Clifford
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We Begin at the End
- By: Chris Whitaker
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Duchess Day Radley is a 13-year-old self-proclaimed outlaw. Rules are for other people. She is the fierce protector of her five-year-old brother, Robin, and the parent to her mother, Star, a single mom incapable of taking care of herself, let alone her two kids. Walk has never left the coastal California town where he and Star grew up. He may have become the chief of police, but he’s still trying to heal the old wound of having given the testimony that sent his best friend, Vincent King, to prison decades before. And he's in overdrive protecting Duchess and her brother.
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Horrible narrator in this audible book
- By M. patton on 03-03-21
By: Chris Whitaker
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Invisible Child
- Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City
- By: Andrea Elliott
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 21 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis has exploded, deepening the chasm between rich and poor. She must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care.
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Narration is completely over the top
- By Heather on 10-14-21
By: Andrea Elliott
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The Detective in the Dooryard
- Reflections of a Maine Cop
- By: Timothy A. Cotton
- Narrated by: Timothy A. Cotton
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Tim Cotton has been a police officer for more than 30 years. The writer in him has always been drawn to the stories of the people he has met along the way. Dealing with the standard issue ne’er-do-wells as a patrol officer, homicide detective, polygraph examiner, and later as the lieutenant in charge of the criminal investigation division certainly provides an interesting backdrop - but more often he writes about the regular folks he encounters, people who need his help, or those who just want to share a joke or even a sad story.
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The small stories are the important stories
- By Hilary A Harston on 02-14-21
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When a Stranger Comes to Town
- By: Michael Koryta
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay, Janina Edwards, Fajer Al-Kaisi, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It's been said that all great literature boils down to one of two stories—a man takes a journey, or a stranger comes to town. While mystery writers have been successfully using both approaches for generations, there's something undeniably alluring in the nature of a stranger: the uninvited guest, the unacquainted neighbor, the fish out of water. In the newest collection of stories by the Mystery Writers of America, each author weaves a fresh tale surrounding the eerie feeling that comes when a stranger enters our midst, featuring stories by prolific mystery writers.
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The narrators are outstanding here.
- By Jennifer Baratta She/Her on 05-16-21
By: Michael Koryta
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Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
- By: Danielle Evans
- Narrated by: Daniel Deadwyler, Jeanette Illidge, Je Nie Fleming, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Striking in their emotional immediacy, the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self are based in a world where inequality is reality but where the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, and the tensions within family and the community, are sometimes the biggest complicating forces in one's sense of identity and the choices one makes.
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things we do to oursekves
- By Jamintel on 02-06-23
By: Danielle Evans
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John Henry Days
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Well-crafted story
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Less (Booktrack Edition)
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Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn 50. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: Your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes—it would be too awkward—and you can't say no—it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. Question: How do you arrange to skip town? Answer: You accept them all. What would possibly go wrong?
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Less is not more. Plus a Pulitzer?
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Shuggie Bain
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Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, DC, this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
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Beautiful
- By Melanie on 03-09-20
By: Louise Erdrich
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- By: Junot Diaz
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Staci Snell
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA.
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Wondrous Book!!!
- By Robert on 06-22-12
By: Junot Diaz
What listeners say about The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 02-06-20
Who spoke for the black boys?
“If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
I'm absolutely sure that there is something beautiful about losing a limb; a leg or arm. This book is beautiful too, but on the first read I'm still just bent over trying to handle the hit in the cut, the pain and the blood. Maybe, if I read it a second time I could experience it without the horror and the pain. But, all of that is necessary, and because of my privilege temporary. Many Americans experienced/experience this book without the ability I have to exit the experience and 'close the book.'
Whitehead is an amazing writer. He is clever, funny, and writes amazing prose, but behind that is an axe and a steamroller. He destroyed me. Sorry if this is disjointed. I'm trying to piece myself together after. Obviously, the Nickel Academy can stand for a lot of things. It can be a metaphor for how we treat black men and boys. It can be a metaphor how we treat minorities in America. It can be a metaphor for our prison system (6 times as many blacks are incarcerated in America than whites). It is all of these things. The horrible thing is this isn't a metaphor. It happened, or something close to it happened, at Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, FL.
It is hard too not to love the two main characters who take two different approaches to the experience of racism and the experience at Nickel. Elwood Curtis is an idealist, raised on an MLK record, who feels like doing the right thing is important, despite the consequences. Turner, his friend, is a skeptic and a survivor. He will shift and move AND survive. Nickel Boys shows how these two friends experience the abuse and power of a racist, white Florida.
This is a story that, like many James Baldwin and Toni Morrison novels, MUST be read.
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29 people found this helpful
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- Mary Herrington-Perry
- 08-05-19
The Social History Beats the Narrative
Important and interesting social history and a fine and unexpected ending make this book worth listening to even though the narrative and the narration are a bit dull.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Ray Stewart
- 07-25-19
Reform School Horror
Based on the true stories of boys living through the horrors of a reform school in 1960s Florida. Heartbreaking and frustrating that humans suffered like this. Whitehead's depictions provide clear images.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Rikkita
- 12-04-19
captivating
Captivating!
Invoked deep emotions within you. Hard to comprehend this could occur in America
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-14-20
Excellent
Engrossing. Sometimes even a work of fiction feels painfully true. I felt connected to all of the characters.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-02-19
Wow!
This book will stay with me for a long time. The story is as captivating as it is horrifying and the narration was absolute perfect.
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- 808SD
- 10-03-19
Tragic from Start to Finish
Mistakes of our past must guide our future. Elwood & Turner are fine examples for us all.
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- Zay
- 03-27-20
amazing!!
absolutely love this, sad but eye opening!! an incredible story about life and its troubles
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- A Feagins
- 11-11-19
Now what I expected
This book was good. So, good. It did not end the way I expected. Whitehead tells the story and has you so engaged and then hits you right in the gut with a twist.
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- Kelly
- 05-20-20
History of a Tragic Place
Being from Tallahassee, I enjoyed the references to familiar places. But knowing the suffering and murderous acts held within those walls makes my heart ache for true justice for every child who lived a story of such shame and abuse. A hard listen, but well worth it.
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