The Reformatory
core novel 2023 The Reformatory
Record
| First published | 2023 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.43 (98,480 ratings, collected 2026-09-15) |
| Page count | 570 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781982188351 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
The Reformatory is set in Gracetown, Florida, in 1950, a town shaped by a history of slavery and ongoing racial violence enforced by the Ku Klux Klan. Twelve-year-old Robert Stephens Jr. lives with his older sister Gloria under an elderly guardian, Ms. Lottie, after their mother's death and their father's forced flight following a false accusation. Robert has a rare and unsettling gift: he can see the ghosts of the dead. After defending his sister from an older white boy's advances, Robert is convicted at a rigged trial and sentenced to months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory notorious for its cruelty and its unexplained deaths. As Gloria and Ms. Lottie pursue every legal avenue to bring him home, Robert must survive the institution's brutality while confronting the restless spirits of boys who never made it out.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Reformatory
- Series: The Reformatory core; position 1 of 1 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Tananarive Due
Awards (verified)
- World Fantasy Award (Best Novel), 2024: won
Notes
- From the series record (The Reformatory): Standalone novel; a ghost story set in a brutal Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. More commonly classified as horror/dark fantasy than secondary-world fantasy (it also won the 2024 Bram Stoker Award, horror's flagship prize); admitted transparently across that boundary, since the World Fantasy Award itself explicitly covers horror/dark-fantasy crossover work, the same treatment this canon has given other genre-boundary universes. Tananarive Due's first universe in this canon.
Sources
- World Fantasy Convention: 2024 World Fantasy Nominations and Winners
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reformatory
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