 The Reformatory, by Tananrive Due.
This book reminded me a lot of The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, and was inspired by the same scandal. The author notes that Robbie Smith is named for a relative of hers who was sent to reform school, though everything else about the character is fictionalized. It's Florida in the 1950s, and Robbie, a 12-year-old Black boy, kicks the White teenager who's harassing his sister Gloria. Robbie is hauled in front of a judge and sentenced to six months in the reformatory, a school so abusive that it has its own graveyard. The reformatory is filled with haints: ghosts of boys who died there from abuse, illness, "killed trying to escape," or a suspicious fire twenty years earlier. Robbie is one of the few who can see them, and the only one who can see them all the time. Gloria, too, has a touch of clairvoyance: she gets glimpses of people's futures. While trying to secure Robbie's release, she encounters real-life figures such as Ruby McCollum and Harry T. Moore, and gets premonitions of their terrible fates. The real horror in the school is not the haints, but the humans, particularly the cruel warden. He delights in tormenting and terrifying the boys, and will gleefully kill them if they try to run away. Some of the staff came in as decent people, but as Robbie's friend Redbone observes, "nobody stays nice" in this place. Robbie realizes that he may have to put his trust in the haints if he doesn't want to become one himself. And the rage-filled haints have their own plans. Trigger warning for torture and sexual assault (both including children), racism, lynching, and substance abuse. Popsugar Reading Challenge: Outside your comfort zone. Booklist Queen: Outside your comfort zone. This Challenge Killed the Bookworm: Creepy cover.
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