Tananarive Due’s novel, The Reformatory, is a devastating read. Every page made my anxiety spike and hackles rise and, yet, I know that what I felt reading Due’s novel was a mere shadow of what I might have been like to be Black and living in Florida in 1950. Although this book contains supernatural elements, real history has a starring role in the narrative. Not only does Due have an ancestor who was incarcerated and died at the Florida School for Boys, she also refers to the Rosewood Massacre, the lynching of Claude Neal, the prosecution of Ruby McCollum, and the murder of Harry T. Moore and his wife. (Moore and McCollum have brief cameos.) The supernatural elements provide no escape from the realization that the things that happen to the protagonists, Gloria and Robert Stephens, actually happened to real people...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.