The Reformatory: A Novel

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 & injustice, for the living, & the dead.

The Reformatory homes in on the horrors that young Black people, of both the past & present, have faced when it comes to racism within the juvenile detention system. — Iyana Jones, Shondaland

°°° 

Gracetown, Florida

June 1950

12-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to 6 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 & 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 & Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member & 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 Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of & bringing his tragedy & those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.

°°° 

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award & NAACP Image Award­–winning author, who was an executive producer on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror for Shudder & teaches Afrofuturism & Black Horror at UCLA. She & her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, cowrote the graphic novel The Keeper.