Amazing book about a fictional "reform school" for boys, told by a black "student", or rather inmate, Elwood Curtis. And his friend, Jack Turner. Writing that gets you from the get-go. Somehow near the end I got a strong Michael Ondaatje feeling; perhaps because this is based on a real story, a real terrible place in Florida where boys were whipped and abused and killed.
She was rarely sick, and when she was, she refused to stay off her feet. She was a survivor but the world took her in bites. Her husband had died young, her daughter had vanished out West, and now her only grandson had been sentenced to this place. She had swallowed the portion of misery the world had given to her, and now there she was, alone on Brevard Street, her family tugged away one by one. She might not be there.
No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren't running the course but running deep into their character - down into the cave to return to the light with what they found.
