Tananarive Due draws on her own family history and extensive research to craft a haunting historical novel about mass incarceration, restless spirits, and family resilience in the Jim Crow south. The children of Gracetown, Florida have an uncanny ability to see ghosts, called haints, which usually fades in their teenage years. The book has two narrators, twelve-year-old Robby Stevens, who has a special talent for seeing spirits, and his sixteen-year-old sister Gloria, who was forced to drop out of school and work as a maid to support them. The Stevens siblings are barely scraping by after their mother dies from cancer and their father, a fiery labor organizer, is chased out of town by a false rape accusation. In the summer of 1950, Robby kicks the teenage son of a powerful white landowner who was sexually harassing Gloria and is summarily sentenced to six months at the notorious Gracetown School for Boys, the local reformatory.

Almost as soon as he arrives, Robby discovers that the reformatory is crawling with the haints of dead boys, including several who died in a fire thirty years before. On being assigned to work in the kitchen, he makes friends with two other black boys nicknamed Redbone and Blue, who teach him the reformatory's endless rules and social codes. But when an older boy overhears them asking about previous escape attempts at dinner, Robby spends his first night being whipped by the sadistic warden, Finton Haddock.

Meanwhile, Gloria enlists allies in an effort to free her little brother: her employer Miss Anne, who's in a clandestine relationship with a female law student, and Miss Lottie, her godmother and a formidable matriarch in the local black community. Together, the women reach out to an NAACP lawyer, but the man fails to persuade Gracetown's judge to release Robby. Gloria goes into hiding when the Ku Klux Klan burns down her house and decides that their only chance to survive is to sneak Robby out of the reformatory and join their father in Chicago.

Robby's extraordinary talent for seeing ghosts brings him to the attention of the warden, who wants to capture and destroy all of the reformatory's haints before they can expose his crimes. Torn between saving himself and betraying the reformatory's other victims, Robby will need help from friends and family both living and dead if he doesn't want to end up trapped in Gracetown as yet another restless spirit. The Reformatory includes graphic violence, difficult discussions of racism, and references to adult situations. I highly recommend this novel to anyone sixteen and over looking for an immersive work of historical fiction with a spooky twist.