June 1950
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.
In The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, the main setting is the Gracetown School for Boys. For a place with so many tragic events tied to it, the name is very plain and unassuming. You would think it’s just a regular, terrible reform school. Oh no, reader. It is so much more nightmarish than a person can imagine.
Robbie Stephens, Jr. kicks a white, wealthy teenager, Lyle McCormack. Lyle was being too forward with Robbie’s sister, Gloria. So Robbie kicked him to make him leave her alone. Unfortunately, defending his sister against Lyle got him sent to The Reformatory.
Robbie and Gloria’s father had left them in Florida. Their mother had passed away not too long before the father’s departure. Life was not going well for the siblings but it was about to get much worse.
Gloria tried so hard to get him out of the place but was met with difficulty at every turn. Robbie was trying to adjust to this awful place. He saw ghosts on a regular basis – some friendly and others not.
The worst human in the book is definitely Warden Fenton J. Haddock. He had the power in this situation so people did what he wanted. No one had the courage to stand up to him. Haddock is a slippery slimeball, which is more kindness than he deserves.
Due is one of the best writers during the last two decades period. Her focus has been Black speculative fiction. I cannot recommend her books enough. When you start one, you won’t be able to put it down.
I created Haddock as an amalgam of a system of violence in children’s incarceration—but the truth is that no one person can explain away the reported events at the Dozier School, or the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, or the Indigenous “schools” in Canada where so many children were buried. No one person can be blamed for our nation’s current nightmare of mass incarceration. The Reformatory has a central villain, but the actual villain is a system of dehumanization.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory
If you are ready for a great horror novel that is also historical fiction, then you are ready for The Reformatory. Whoever sees themself identifying with the villain, might not be prepared for the ending.
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- I received this ebook from NetGalley. This is my honest review. Obviously.
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