"
Haunting and haunted...
devastating...The book feels like a mission, and it's an essential one...he pulls off a brilliant sleight of hand that elevates the mere act of resurrecting Elwood's buried story into at once a miracle and a tragedy."--Frank Rich,
The New York Times Book Review (cover)
"
Stellar...
heartbreaking...a beautiful, unforgettable young hero who walks right off the page and into your heart...If you have been thinking you should read Colson Whitehead,
The Nickel Boys is the perfect place to start."-
Newsday "A book that will further cement his place in the pantheon of influential American writers." --
Time Magazine "
The Nickel Boys is a
chilling, masterful novel that explores the depths of evil and the resilience of the human spirit. Whitehead's prose is dazzling, and the narrative's nimble twist is a swift kick to the solar plexus."--
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune "
Propulsive and gorgeous and completely devastating."--LitHub.com
"THE NICKEL BOYS is in conversation with works by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and especially Martin Luther King.... 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 "A tense, nervy performance, even more rigorously controlled than its predecessor. The narration is disciplined and the sentences plain and sturdy, oars cutting into the water. Every chapter hits its marks."-- Parul Seghal,
The New York Times "
The Nickel Boys often feels like Whitehead's conversation with both the idealistic forerunners of the civil rights generation and...the woke youth of today."--Laura Miller, Slate.com
"Not a moment is wasted, and for someone who writes as vividly as Whitehead, there's also a graceful economy here. He uses words carefully, as if he doesn't want them to get in the way of the truth he's excavating."-
Boston Globe