The Reformatory
It is 1950 in Gracetown, Florida, and twelve-year-old Robert Stephens Jr. is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys after a minor scuffle with a white teenager. His father has already been driven out of town on a false accusation, and his sister Gloria is left scrambling to free him. Inside the reformatory, Robert's gift for seeing haints, the ghosts of the dead, becomes a window into the children who never made it out. Tananarive Due bases the novel on the real Dozier School for Boys, where her own great-uncle died, blending horror with hard history into a story about racism, survival, and the love between a brother and sister.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Reformatory
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In 1950s Florida, a Black boy who can see ghosts is sentenced to a brutal reform school where the dead reveal the horrors done to children there.
Yes. Stephen King praised it, saying readers were in for a treat and that Due hit it out of the park.
It is fiction, but it is loosely based on the real Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where Tananarive Due's great-uncle died in 1937.
The Reformatory was written by Tananarive Due, published in 2023 by Saga Press.
The Reformatory is 576 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Reformatory takes most readers 9 to 12 hours to finish.
The Reformatory is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.