A good kid with a good future ahead of him is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He finds himself attending The Nickel Academy, a reform school for juvenile boys. Quickly learning that doing the “right” thing gets you nowhere except whipped until you black out (or much worse), he befriends a fellow Black boy who has a different way of survival. The Nickel Boys [2019] by Colson Whitehead is set in the 1960s but is based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys that shut down as RECENTLY as 2011 when unidentified bodies were dug up on campus. Were politicians, businessmen, and policemen in on it? You bet.