Book Reviews

The Reformatory

Horrors of both supernatural and natural kinds.

In 1950, 12-year-old Robert Stephens, Jr., fights off a teenage boy who is making aggressive sexual advances on Robert’s sister. Robert is black, the older boy is white and the son of a prominent citizen in the Jim Crow south. You know immediately it’s not going to go well for Robert. He’s sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory notorious for its brutality and from where some boys never return. This is where the horror begins.

Robbie enters the cruel system, quickly learning rules for survival from his friends Blue and Redbone—how to not-see what they witness, how to avoid the sadistic Warden Haddock—and adopts the dread the boys feel at being sent to the “Fun House.”

What adds to the horror is that this reformatory is based on the infamous Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, operated by the state of Florida from January 1900 to June 2011. Hundreds of men have testified to the cruelty, gruesome beatings, and rape they suffered while youths at the school, often sent there for minor offenses or for the crime of being orphans. In recent years, researchers from the University of Florida have found the remains of at least 55 boys buried on the grounds.

Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019) is also based on the Dozier School, a tense, gritty novel with a jaw-dropping twist at the end. Tananarive Due is a major writer of Black horror and speculative fiction, author of such works as The Between (1995), The Good House (2003), and The Living Blood (2001), which won the American Book Award, and she adds a supernatural element to the “natural” horrors of the school: Robbie is able to see the ghosts, or haints, of the boys who died there, and through them, he learns the full extent of the horrors that have been committed, and why many boys have gone missing. Their spirits are now seeking revenge for the injustices that were their lives.

For readers, supernatural horror is easier to live with. We can put the book down when finished, knowing it’s fiction. It’s much more discomforting when realizing the horror actually happened.

Both Colson’s and Due’s novels are riveting and disturbing mirrors to the racial injustice that is part of our nation’s history. But for Due, there is also a more personal connection. The Reformatory is dedicated to her great uncle, Robert Stephens, who was killed at the Dozier School for Boys in 1937. He was 15 years old.

“Don’t b’lieve in ‘evil’ in most ways,” Miz Lottie said. “I believe in the devil, all right, but man don’t need no help from Satan to do what folks call ‘evil.’ Man do evil ev’ry day and call it doin’ their job. Slave drivers was ‘doin’ their job,’ beatin’ the skin off folks… ’Cuz, see, colored folks fighting for what’s theirs is like a virus to white folks—and they kill a virus so it don’t spread. That killing is the work of man, not the devil.”

from The Reformatory

Tananarive Due

Saga Press

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (October 15, 2024.) Reprinted with permission.

The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur

But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled on into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends. Till the last day, and maybe not even then. Who knows what stories they tell in Heaven.

from The Bright Sword

Lev Grossman

Viking

The God of the Woods

"Do you ever worry that being born into money has stunted us?"

Alice blanched.

I don't mean anything by it," said Delphine. "It's just - lately I've been wondering whether having all of our material needs met from birth has been a positive aspect of our lives. It seems to me it may have resulted in some absence of yearning or striving in us. The quest, I like to call it. When one's parents or grandparents have already quested and conquered, what is there for subsequent generations to do?"

From God of the Woods

Liz Moore

Riverhead Books

The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook

His officers were noticing subtle shifts in his mood and command style. He had become erratic, and at times tyrannical. Cook was known as humane and reasonable. But increasingly, he, too, began to dole out the lashes, the bread and-water treatment, and other punishments. As he headed into the southern hemisphere once again, it appeared to some that Cook’s judgment — and his legendary equanimity — had begun to falter […] It was as though the strains and stresses of the previous voyage were finally catching up with Cook. This was certainly true of his vessel, for the Resolution was revealing her many cracks and flaws. She was, wrote one Cook scholar, a “tired ship, commanded by a tired man.”
–from The Wide Wide Sea

Hampton Sides

Doubleday

The Ministry of Time

“I’m not going to insult you by feeding you aphorisms about omelets and broken eggs… you signed up for this job. You thought, as much as I did, that what we were doing was world-changing. That’s what you wanted, remember? Do you think the world changes by being asked politely? Or do you think there has to be risk?” She took a deep breath. All the emotions I normally watched her puree into professionalism were churning on her face. “I came here,” she said, “because you—because—I thought you would understand. Don’t you? Being the experiment.”

From The Ministry of Time

Kaliane Bradley

Avid Reader Press

James

“What you doin’ out here?” (Huck) asked.

“Furst off, I’m freezin’,” I said. “What you be doin’ on dis ilan? And why you got blood all ova ya?”

“I kilt myself,” the boy said.

I looked him over. “You din’t do a good job.”

‘Well, Miss Watson, that damn judge and Pap think I’m dead and that’s all that matters. They think I was murdered.”

“Why dey think dat?” I asked.

“I kilt a pig and spread his blood all around Pap’s cabin. I made a mess like there had been a fight in there.”

In my head I was doing the math. Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away. Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?”

from James

Percival Everett

Doubleday

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World

There are poems I repeat to myself, almost like a hum, or a prayer, or a spell. I’ve said them so often they trip off my tongue. It feels like they’ve gone into my body. I know some people who learn many poems off by heart, and I keep trying to start up that habit again. I haven’t yet been successful. So I return to the ones I’ve been repeating for years, again, and again, and again. They’re comforts, a little bit of home carried in sound.

from Poetry Unbound

Pádraig Ó Tuama

Publisher: W.W. Norton and Company

You Only Call When You’re in Trouble

At a certain point in most long-term relationships, it’s expected that public displays of affection will be supplanted by public displays of annoyance. After six or more years, affection in public takes on the flavor of protesting too much and reeks of the uniquely sad kindness an unfaithful spouse showers on the person he’s betraying.

from You Only Call When You’re in Trouble

Publisher: Henry Holt & Company

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism. Hannah Arendt noticed the phenomenon decades ago (in The Origins of Totalitarianism). When she looked into the lives of people who had become political fanatics, she found two things: loneliness and spiritual emptiness…They revert to tribe. Tribalism seems like a way to restore the bonds of community. It certainly does bind people together. But it is actually the dark twin of community. Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism…is connection based on mutual hatred. Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on a common foe…Tribalism is community for lonely narcissists.

from The Second Mountain

Publisher: Random House

Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics

H.W. Brands

Doubleday

What Washington deemed an awful crisis, Alexander Hamilton accounted an opportunity. Some of the difference was temperamental. Washington preferred calm, while Hamilton thrived on uproar, to the extent of creating his own when circumstances didn’t provide enough. But some reflected the different arcs of their careers. Washington expected that his days of great accomplishment were over; he currently enjoyed all the esteem his ego desired. Hamilton’s career had hardly started, his egotism was far from sated, and every crack in the status quo afforded an avenue he might exploit to advance himself.

from Founding Partisans