The best book I read this month is one I finished about 5 minutes ago, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t been reading much the last couple of months. The social distancing and stay at home orders have messed up my focus and concentration. Instead of reading a book a week, as I am wont to do, I have been managing a book a month roughly.

This one, though, grabbed me by the throat and kept me reading. I finished in a matter of days. The prose isn’t rich or flowery. It doesn’t lull you into a sense of comfort. It is stark, and sometimes disconcerting, like the story it tells. And it is captivating.

The Nickel Boys tells about a young African American man sent to the Nickel Academy, a Florida reform school where abuse and corruption rule the day. The tale was inspired by the real-life events at the Dozier School for Boys. (If you’re not familiar with what happened at Dozier, please look it up. The boys who died there and the ones who survived need us to bear witness.)

The book jumps back and forth in time, telling about life before, during, and after Elwood Curtis’s time at Nickel. And the twist at the end caught me completely by surprise. I literally gasped.

This has none of the fantasy elements present in Whitehead’s previous book, The Underground Railroad (another good read). It is steeped in fact and truth, and that makes it incredibly powerful.