Member Review
Review by
Keriann D, Reviewer
This is my third book from the Man Booker Longlist and I honestly think I am done....none of the books have been to a great standard and this wasn't either.
I was looking forward to a grity prison drama taking a lot at the damaged justice and prison system in the US, what I got instead was a boring and disjointed book!
From the blurb:
Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Outside is the world from which she has been permanently severed: the San Francisco of her youth, changed almost beyond recognition. The Mars Room strip club where she once gave lap dances for a living. And her seven-year-old son, Jackson, now in the care of Romy’s estranged mother.
Inside is a new reality to adapt to: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive. The deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner details with humour and precision. Daily acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike. Allegiances formed over liquor brewed in socks, and stories shared through sewage pipes.
Romy sees the future stretch out ahead of her in a long, unwavering line – until news from outside brings a ferocious urgency to her existence, challenging her to escape her own destiny and culminating in a climax of almost unbearable intensity. Through Romy – and through a cast of astonishing characters populating The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner presents not just a bold and unsentimental panorama of life on the margins of contemporary America, but an excoriating attack on the prison-industrial complex
We do meet Romy and spend quite a lot of time with her however we also meet a lot of characters and get ALL of their backstories and I just found that boring, I'd rather that we just stuck with Romy because I did enjoy some of her parts. My main problem with this book is that we jumped forward and back in time, between characters from first to third person within chapters and there were certain sections where I wasn't clear who we were following. There is a a lot of diversity in this book and we learn that the lower your social and economic background the less you are regarded as a person in terms of the legal system....however these sections are short and far between more focusing on every single detail of every characters life!! *yawn*
I am really starting to think about the standard of this year Manbooker prize and the standard of the books!!
Not one I would recommend at all.
I was looking forward to a grity prison drama taking a lot at the damaged justice and prison system in the US, what I got instead was a boring and disjointed book!
From the blurb:
Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Outside is the world from which she has been permanently severed: the San Francisco of her youth, changed almost beyond recognition. The Mars Room strip club where she once gave lap dances for a living. And her seven-year-old son, Jackson, now in the care of Romy’s estranged mother.
Inside is a new reality to adapt to: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive. The deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner details with humour and precision. Daily acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike. Allegiances formed over liquor brewed in socks, and stories shared through sewage pipes.
Romy sees the future stretch out ahead of her in a long, unwavering line – until news from outside brings a ferocious urgency to her existence, challenging her to escape her own destiny and culminating in a climax of almost unbearable intensity. Through Romy – and through a cast of astonishing characters populating The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner presents not just a bold and unsentimental panorama of life on the margins of contemporary America, but an excoriating attack on the prison-industrial complex
We do meet Romy and spend quite a lot of time with her however we also meet a lot of characters and get ALL of their backstories and I just found that boring, I'd rather that we just stuck with Romy because I did enjoy some of her parts. My main problem with this book is that we jumped forward and back in time, between characters from first to third person within chapters and there were certain sections where I wasn't clear who we were following. There is a a lot of diversity in this book and we learn that the lower your social and economic background the less you are regarded as a person in terms of the legal system....however these sections are short and far between more focusing on every single detail of every characters life!! *yawn*
I am really starting to think about the standard of this year Manbooker prize and the standard of the books!!
Not one I would recommend at all.
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