Laura Mendez

Job: Branch Manager, Lemon Grove Branch Library, San Diego County Library

She recommends: “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday Books, 2019; 213 pages)

“The Nickel Boys,” winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is a modern classic by Colson Whitehead, author of “The Underground Railroad.” “The Nickel Boys” chronicles the trials and tribulations of Elwood Curtis, a young Black boy with big dreams and a promising future, living in 1960s Florida. Elwood, like too many Black men, was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and was sent to The Nickel Academy. The Nickel Academy proves to be a true house of horrors, masquerading as a reform school. Whitehead brutally details frequent beatings, “disappearances,” sexual violations and rampant psychological abuse committed by school authorities. “The Nickel Boys” is a gutwrenching read, made all the more chilling because of its basis in reality. Whitehead’s Nickel Academy is modeled after the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Fla., which operated as a state-run reform school for more than a hundred years. Despite numerous reports of abuse, the school remained operational until 2011. “The Nickel Boys” and the Dozier School’s long history serve as stark reminders of how many other Black stories of unjust pain and suffering are hidden from public knowledge, waiting to be uncovered.

Kim Devoe

Job: Bookseller, Warwick’s

She recommends: “Homeland Elegies” by Ayad Akhtar (Little, Brown and Co., 2020; 368 pages)

This complicated, brilliant book explores the contradictions and paradoxes of contemporary America. It examines the United States through the experiences of a Pakistani-american family similar to the author’s. The parents are doctors, and their son, Ayad, who narrates this story, grows up in Wisconsin as Islamic fundamentalism and Islamaphobia are rising. Ayad’s father has embraced the American dream, but Ayad, a struggling writer, is increasingly conflicted about his Muslim and American identities. Like the author, his life changes after 9/11 as he experiences horrifying racism and subsequently writes a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. His seduction by fame and fortune is gloriously detailed, but it does not last. Nor does his father’s American dream. Mixing fiction, memoir, history and cultural analysis, this urgent, kaleidoscopic novel exposes both the myriad problems of America today and the hope it still represents to everyone who calls it home.

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