“The Reformatory” by Tananarive Due (Review)

Due, Tananarive. The Reformatory. New York: Saga Press, 2023.

ISBN-13: 978-1982188344 | $28.99 USD | 570 pages | Historical Horror

Blurb

A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.

Gracetown, Florida

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.

Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.

The Reformatory is a haunting work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.

Review

5 stars

Horror was one of the only categories of the Goodreads Choice Awards this year stacked with diverse talent, and The Reformatory was a book mentioned in some of the livestreams I watched as a book worth honoring (inasmuch as it is an honor). And while I have not read Tananarive Duke before, her reputation as an author speaks for itself and historical horror, especially from Black authors and other marginalized voices, will always be of interest to me.

I appreciated how Due took a story deeply entrenched in her family’s history and in the lives of many Black Americans in the Jim Crow era. While I didn’t know about the Dozier School for Boys, I knew a bit about life in the Jim Crow South, and especially how the legacy of Jim Crow continues to impact today’s prison system.

Following the inciting incident and Robbie being locked up, the story simultaneously follows Robbie and his harrowing experience within “The Reformatory,” and Gloria’s from the outside as she tirelessly attempts to advocate for his release. Robbie’s parts of the book are truly dark, capturing the bleak nature of an institution like this, but there’s also a suspenseful bent to it, as he learns new things about his fellow inmates, and his supernatural abilities come into play more and more. However, Gloria’s portion of the story is no less engaging, and just as I rooted for Robbie to figure out a way out, I wanted Gloria to find a way to help him.

This book is long, but it absolutely earns every word. With a lot going on, there was a lot going on to keep the pages turning and the fire burning. While it can be hard to balance two story arcs, even if they are interconnected, due to the contrasting tones, Due pulled this off successfully.

This book was absolutely fantastic, and I’m curious to try more from Tananarive Due in the future. I strongly recommend this book if you’re looking for a hard-hitting work of Black historical horror.

Author Bio

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award–winning author, who was an executive producer on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror for Shudder and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. She and her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, cowrote the graphic novel The Keeper and an episode for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone for Paramount Plus and Monkeypaw Productions. Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections, Ghost Summer: Stories and The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. She is also coauthor of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due). Learn more at TananariveDue.com.

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