The Reformatory

[cornerofmadness]

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


First off I feel bad because I should have done this before this book came out as I received it as a GR giveaway but it came at a time of a serious health event and I didn't have the mindset to read something as depressing as this is. So that's part of your content warning right there. This book has depressing themes, racism and child abuse (physical, emotional, sexual) for almost 600 pages. But what makes it worse is it's drawn from real cases from the Dozier school in Florida. If you don't know what that is, look it up before taking this book on. Boys died. Lots of them. And when you listen to survivors talking about the beatings they suffered (and as bad as it was for the white boys you know it had to be ten times worse for boys of color), you want to put the people in charge through that same hell.

So back to the actual book and not the history that inspired it (Also needs mentioning Mz Due lost a relative to the Dozier school). I will say that in some places I think it went on a bit long. I'd have loved for it to have started with Robbie's ride to the school. I'm not sure we needed the how (He tried to defend his sister, Gloria from an influential white man's son) in such detail. But regardless, Robbie's fear (he is so very young after all) leaps off the page. He does make two friends almost immediately, Blue and Redbone who tell him how to survive and how to be least likely to piss off the men in charge and get beaten in 'the fun room' or put into a sweltering pit as punishment.

The story alternates mostly between his point of view and Gloria's (and the monster running the school on occasion) Gloria is trying to rally help from the town (since he was rushed through the Jim Crow South's sense of justice) as well as her father's but he's in Chicago, forced to run after trying to unionize Black workers. This is a ghost story, the ghosts of the boys murdered in the school but the real horror isn't the child abuse or the ghosts, it's the fact that this stuff really happened. It's fictionalized history but the point remains children were tormented and murdered white and black (more the latter naturally and the book acknowledges that too).

Robbie is endearing. I enjoyed his chapters more than Gloria's probably because he is in the more immediate danger. It took me months to read this because again health issues and the depressive nature of this book. By now the book has won a Stoker award (justifiably) and has probably been banned in the state it's set in for showing history in all its ugliness.

This is not an easy read but it's an important one. Stephen King loved it. You might too.




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