Really enjoyed this one. Various points of view but written in a way where it’s not confusing. Dark humour, sad at times, great read.

Incredibly smart and readable exploration of life within incarceration exploring issues relating specifically to women. Timely and important and doesn't sugar coat the experience.

Since I read this book, it has won awards and been shortlisted for many more. I can't remember having read a book before which made me feel so angry. The author's humour and satire does not soften the fact that thousands of women are living in conditions like the ones the book describes: separated from their children, without access to legal aid or medical care, for the crime of defending themselves. I would urge anyone who reads this novel to go away and research the prison industrial complex in the USA. Readers in the UK should pay particular attention to our government's moves towards privatisation.

This is such a powerful book and I absolutely loved it. It tells the story of Romy Hall, a young mother beginning two consecutive life sentences for the murder of her stalker. The narrative follows several characters and their journey through the correctional system, whether as a convict or as an employee and it was so wonderfully constructed that I flew through it. The characters are all beautifully drawn with an authenticity that is palpable, and so we see all sides of these people - the good and the bad. While there is a plot and a drive to the narrative, it is secondary to the exploration of day to day life in the prison and the flashbacks to the outside world that helps to flesh out the motivations of each character. This is not for the faint hearted - there are frequent discussions of drug use and violence, but I would highly recommend this to anyone with an appreciation for a no holds barred narrative that exposes the reality of prison life.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Having read this book it comes as absolutely no surprise to see it shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It’s an excellent book that takes a deep dive into the experience of women incarcerated in America. Romy Hall is serving two life sentences for the murder of a man who was stalking her. Assured by her public defender lawyer that the best thing to do was to take a deal, Romy finds herself cut off from her son, Jackson, and with no hope of ever being released. This book does an excellent job of showing how women prisoners become almost invisible once convicted. Their overworked lawyers move onto the next case, they have to wait hours or days to make a phone call and the guards are wholly unsympathetic. The reasoning being “Your choice, your consequences”. The reader is torn between feeling sympathy for Romy’s fellow convicts and then horror when finding out the crime they committed. An English teacher at the prison goes through the same journey, convincing himself he won’t become involved but then gradually finding himself doing favours and running errands for Romy.

Much like Orange is the New Black, Romy is our Trojan horse. The eyes for the reader to see what happens when these women are locked up. The petty bureaucracy involved when wanting to make a simple phone call and how the rules are almost engineered to set inmates up to fail. Romy’s story is interspersed throughout the book. How a man who frequented the strip bar where she worked went from overfamiliar regular to full on stalker. Even on the outside Romy found herself unheard and unprotected. Her story has an almost depressing inevitability to it, as does her sons as her becomes increasingly out of Romy’s reach.

I found this book to be utterly absorbing. Sections are almost like several vignettes linked together as Romy’s fellow inmates tell their stories. It’s a book with a lot to say and I hope to see it on several more shortlists so it’s popularity grows. A very important read given our current climate.

I received a ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for a fair review.

I didn't finish this book - I wasn't a fan of the narrative style, although I did find the main character intriguing. Perhaps I wasn't in the right mood for it when I picked it up and I wouldn't rule out returning to it in the future.

Really compelling read, unusual character and setting but horrendously bleak as well. Plot moves in unexpected ways and offers hope where really there can’t be and sympathetic characters grounded in horrific backstories. Unputdownable and really stays in your thoughts afterwards.

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.

Rachel Kushner has written a book that is very obviously close to her heart and the result of a whole lot of research. I found her personal stance to be understandable and un-deniable but she did not sacrifice her writing or her plot to make her point.

The anchor of this sprawling story of women in prison is Romy Hall, sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for the killing of her stalker. The book starts heart-wrenchingly with her being driven to the prison where she will be spending the rest of her life. This early scene hooked me completely and made me not only sympathetic to Romy’s story but also highly invested. Her story is told in unchronological flashbacks while we follow her first few years in prison. Additionally Kushner writes a series of vignettes of the other inmates’ stories as well as adding a few outside perspectives. These vignettes work well in humanizing the inmates (if that is at all necessary). In all these stories, Kushner emphasises the role a lack of agency resulting from less than ideal circumstances had in the way people’s lives turns out.

While I often found that these multiple perspectives worked really well, I found Doc’s character superfluous and quite grating to be spending time with. While I can absolutely see the point to the other perspectives, with his I could not get on board. I thought it did not add anything substantial to the overall work and it did distract from other, more interesting characters. My gut reaction upon finishing this book had been that I wished Kushner had concentrated on the female perspectives, on reflection I can actually see the way these male perspectives mirrored the female experiences and went a long way in deepening my understanding of just how stacked against those women the system is. Even the people mostly sympathetic to the women’s causes (such as Gordon) never really saw the women as people in their own rights, with worth not related to how much the men liked them.

This is a super ambitious book that overall impressed me immensely even if I wasn’t always quite in love with it – there were a couple of decisions made towards the end that did not quite work for me. But I guess I do prefer a book to aim to high and fail a little to one that doesn’t challenge me at all. I found it ultimately heart-breaking and infuriating – the way these women are treated made me angry to no end and Rachel Kushner’s impressive attention to detail worked in making this book feel lived in. It absolutely deserves its place on the Man Booker longlist but I would not be dissappointed if it didn’t make the shortlist.

The sky was the bleak white of old kitchen appliances. Wind blew dust into our eyes as we sat on the ground waiting to watch staff or guards walk by on the other side of the razor wire. Such was the excitement we lived for.”

I’ll be upfront about this and say things are not off to the best start with Rachel Kushner’s – The Mars Room

Kushner’s book nominally about ex lap dancer (at the club which provides the book with its title) Romy Hall: a young woman facing two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility for killing her stalker. It also means the loss of her seven-year-old son, Jackson, who is now being looked after by Romy’s estranged mother.

We also get the additional voices of Doc (ex-cop, also in prison for murder), Gordon Hauser (prison teacher) and Kurt (stalker).

There’s a lot of nice detail in the book, not all of it prison cliché, a good overarching examination of class, power, gender and social status and there is an appealing (if that is the right word) cast of prison characters. So why was this book such a struggle? I almost gave up on it a handful of times. I found it emotionally unengaging and distant. Whilst a couple of characters peaked my interest, I didn’t care about any of them – the reality of course for the vast majority of these very characters in real life.

Maybe that’s the point?

I certainly cared about the general situations, especially the fact that so many people, especially those without deep pockets, are let down by the legal system. But I felt weighed down by the book: distracted; bored; tired. The ‘other’ voices don’t help. Whilst I can see the point of Doc, through a Romy prison connection, and for a different prison arc, both his and Hauser’s sections just added to my disconnect with the main Romy thread.

Still, LOTS of people are raving about this and clearly the Booker judges have seen the same things those people have seen in this book. Sorry I wasn’t one of them.

But, maybe it was still worth reading for this one line which stuck with me:

“The lie of regret and the life gone off the rails. What rails. The life is the rails. It is its own rails and it goes where it goes. It cuts its own path. My path took me here”

Romy Hall has been given 2 consecutive life sentences for the murder of her stalker. This novel follows her arrival at prison, and reveals the story of her life in the lead up and at the start of her incarceration. We also meet some of the women who she lives with during this time.
I can see why this book has been nominated for The Man Booker Prize 2018 - it clearly shows how a childhood of poverty and benign neglect can lead to drug addiction and crime. It also shows the awful conditions of the prison that Romy is kept in and the hatred of the guards towards their charges. This isn't an environment of rehabilitation, it's an environment of harsh punishment. Which probably explains the high rates of reoffending.
It's a frustrating book to read, because I think the reader really does start to care about the people that they read about (at least I did) even though the writing doesn't actually invite us to feel for the characters. In fact it's all written in quite a detached way. They are more than just the crime they committed, and this book shows that.

How would you cope if you knew you has to spend the rest of your life in prison? Romy Hall is facing two life sentences plus time, and her previous life, stripping at the Mars Room has been traded for a life she must learn to live behind bars.

But we quickly learn that all is not what it seems. Romy is not just a low-life stripper, she is a mother, she is intelligent and educated defying the expectations of those around her, as many of the women she is confined with do. As the reason for Romy's arrest and incarceration start to unravel we are confronted with the stark injustices of society, a world where the decks were stacked against these women, and a world where to survive, you have to break the rules.

Kushner does an incredible job of painting the desperation of Romy's life outside the prison, and the myriad of emotions she feels as she tries to survive inside. The portrayal of life behind bars is simultaneously mind-numbing, infuriating, intriguing, and sometimes funny. The women strive to make meaning, to continue living, in the face of what is most people's worst nightmare. But for some of these women it is the norm.

Romy's situation is compounded by her worry for her young son on the outside. The injustice and bureaucracy that follows are sickening, and Kushner's treatment of the plot ingeniously mirrors what life for the women must be like, the slow pace marking the day after day drugery, the plotlessness marking the directionless life they lead, and the constant detours into the stories of others illustrative of the forced proximity to others.

This story is a compelling exploration of incarceration of women in the states and Romy's case - from how she makes her living, to her crime, to her relationship with her son all highlight the difficulties, and double standards women still face today. This book should enrage the reader and is devastating, with some of the stories profoundly sad. We catch glimmers of hope, but they are fleeting and the end of the novel crushes any fantasies we hold of happy ending, reminding us that women serving life sentences don't get happy endings.

The complexities of this book are incredibly clever and a stark reminder to readers that being a 'criminal' doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, and that the law works in favour of some and not others. There are characters in this book who hold the idea that these women deserve this life because they are guilty - and they are just the people who would benefit from reading this book. A searing indictment of modern society, this is a feminist blockbuster which deserves it place on the Man Booker longlist.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Jonathan Cape through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

One word review: Unputdownable

Rambling review: This was exactly the book I needed to get me out of a reading lull. It is unputdownable, edgy, trippy, confrontational, intersectional, progressive, modern - I don't want to say much more for fear of spoilering, but I LOVED it.

Whilst it isn't fair to belittle its originality by comparing it to OITNB, I will definitely be recommending it to fans of the TV show. There are many parallels (not least the Trojan Horse element) and the draws are similar, but they both have their own edge to them.

P.S. I did spend a significant amount of time wondering how one would pronounce the protagonist's name, Rony... Rooney, like Sally Rooney? Ronnie, like the two Ronnie's??

Star rating: 5!

Year published: 2018

Publishing house: Jonathan Cape

Amazon Summary: 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.

Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility is Romy Hall’s new home, convicted to life sentence. What brought the mother of a young boy to this institution? And how can she cope with the rules that life in prison follows? Romy Hall remembers her life outside, her addiction and most of all The Mars Room where she stripped for a living. This is also where she met the man who was to change her life. Now, her life only consists of surviving, not getting in the way of the leaders or staff who have their own laws behind the bars. Life inside mirrors the outside, there are ruling classes and those ruled. And sometimes both spheres interact – often not for the better.

Rachel Kushner paints a blunt picture of life inside a prison. The idea of such a place as somewhere you can become a better person and atone for your wrongdoings is far from what she describes. It is a constant struggle of surviving and of adapting to the unwritten laws. Life is a series of disappointments, visitors who never come, news which do not reach you. And outside, there isn’t much waiting for you either.

It wasn’t that easy for me to sympathise with the protagonist Romy. This might be due to her role; even though she is inside, she remains an observer somehow. At the same time, there is so much unsaid about her that makes it difficult to form a whole picture of her. The fact that the reason for her imprisonment isn’t given immediately, on the other hand, adds to the underlying suspense of the novel. Slowly you get closer to the culminating point which reveals what happened. Additionally, the other characters are, obviously, those at the margins of society, people you wouldn’t actually socialise with and which sometimes repel you as a reader.

What I really liked is Kushner’s style of writing. The protagonist’s narration flows like a stream of consciousness which makes it quite realistic and lively. Furthermore, she often hints at what is to come without saying too much, just enough to arouse your interest. When Romy talks about her life and most of all about her future, she is quite direct – well, there isn’t much reason to embellish anything and therefore, her words sound absolutely authentic.

This is a really interestingly written book. I haven’t read any of Kushner’s previous work so her style took a little time for me to adjust to. It’s almost like a stream of consciousness in the sense that the characters thoughts change direction quite frequently and without warning. This can be slightly jarring a times but once used to it, I found it quite effective. However, I can see some people finding it slightly off putting because it can be a little hard to follow.
I did not particularly like the main character, Romy, at times. She is harsh and difficult to warm to but it is impossible not to feel for her and her situation at times. The book does very much throw the realities some people have to live with into stark relief and it does feel like some people are just stuck in a horrendous cycle of darkness. The women depicted in The Mars Room are all so different and very extreme but they do feel completely realistic and plausible which makes the book a harsh, unflinching read at times. This story highlights the many injustices and serious problems embedded in the legal and prison systems. The book is set in America but plenty of these issues are present in a multitude of places and The Mars Room doesn’t pull any punches showing the violence, brutality and depression that seems to be a constant in prison life.
I can’t say in all honesty that I really enjoyed this read because it is pretty relentless in its bleakness. Saying that, I still thinks it’s an incredibly worthwhile book. It’s something quite different and the structure lends itself relatively well to the story. I think it’s important to hear these kinds of stories to show how different other people’s lives are and how, whilst there are a thousand small moments that lead to the incarceration of these characters, sometimes all people can see is the end result. Not an easy book but an essential one I think.

This somewhat effective, but perhaps overlong prison novel revolves around former stripper Romy Hall, serving two life sentences for murdering her stalker. It is enlightening about how the US prison systems work and the problems with it. However Romy isn't particularly sympathetic, and the male characters are awful (intentionally so in at least 2 cases, but intentional as it may have been, it didn't make for an enjoyable read). By the end I did feel like I was being hit over the head a bit too much about how awful prison is, but the choice of an unsympathetic protagonist left me responding to that with a shrug rather than outrage. Rachel Kushner's writing is fantastic but the topic and characters here did not work for me.

What strikes me about this book is the intelligence - cultural, theoretical, emotional - that Kushner brings to her difficult subject. Through Romy Hall, her 29 year old protagonist, she confronts us with lives lived on the margins of criminality, tainted by ill-luck and, yes, bad choices.

Kushner is smart enough not to make her characters passive victims, even while outlining the in-built biases of the justice system: the public defenders who are over-worked and inept, the sentences that are out of proportion to crimes committed ('London was doing life for having written a bad check'), the lack of interest in mitigating circumstances which are kept out of court.

The book challenges our own prejudices: a 15-year old girl is forced to give birth on the prison reception floor, is chained up even as she tries to wipe the after-birth from herself - we're outraged... until we later learn what she did to be imprisoned. Not that official brutality should ever be condoned but Kushner doesn't take, and doesn't offer us, any easy way out.

The writing throughout is precise and cool - I've seen negative reviews citing the lack of emotionality as a reason for non-engagement. I didn't feel that, and liked Kushner's restraint, her refusal to over-emote in the way that a less novelist might have which would have cheapened the book.

My criticism and the reason for dropping half a star is the messy insertion of Doc's story, a dirty cop, loosely linked to one of the women in prison - this felt unnecessary, distracting rather than adding to the women's tales. The way, though, that Romy's present story is interwoven with her past is masterly.

So a hard-hitting book that takes on a system ruled by bureaucracy and inhumanity: it left me choked by the end - and eager to get my hands on Kushner's previous books immediately.

The US prison system is not pretty and in particular, for juveniles it can be downright wrong when they are tried as adults and locked away for life. 'The Mars Room' follows a number of characters in and around the prison system. The main character, Romy, is serving two life sentences. She had worked at The Mars Room as a lap dancer, one of the clients had stalked her and she murdered him, probably to protect herself and her child, but these circumstances were not taken into consideration when she was sentenced.

There are other characters; the prison educator, the bent cop, the pregnant teenager, those on death row. Whilst these appearances, some no more than brief glimpses, help paint the picture of the prison system it did make the book very confusing to read. It may be the version that I read but with the constant chopping and changing between characters and timeframes it was difficult to establish whose voice was narrating, maybe there are visual clues in the printed book?

So whilst I enjoyed Romy's story, I did have to work hard at reading the book to keep up with what was happening and to whom.

I think I would like to hear more from Kushner about the motivations for this book and the choices she made regarding its structure before I make a final judgement on how I feel about it. It seems to have received a lot of positive reviews in the pre-publication buzz. It is supposed to be a gritty prison drama that has something to say about incarceration, poverty/class, sexism and other topics. I was looking forward to reading it.

And it does include a lot of interesting writing.

"Prison was a place where you had to be strong to get through each day. If you thought about some awful act you’d committed, every day, in graphic detail, enough to prove to a parole board that you had insight, the proverbial insight they wanted, needed, to let you go home, you might lose your mind. To stay sane, that was the thing. To stay sane you formed a version of yourself you could believe in."

But I have to acknowledge that I really struggled to get to grips with the novel and I think it was the structure that put me off more than anything else. It is, to my mind, incredibly disjointed. This is why I would like to hear more from Kushner about what she was trying to achieve with the book. I am not completely unaccustomed to disjointed novels: I recently read Flights, for example, and they don’t come much more disjointed than that. But I loved Flights whereas I struggled with this one. And I have been asking myself why since I finished it. I think it has to do with Flights building something that grows in the reader’s mind, even if the parts don't seem to be joined up, but The Mars Room seems to simply confuse plot lines. At times, I felt like Kushner had a list of topics she wanted to address and was simply ticking them off as she covered them. One of the most interesting things I discovered as I read this was that parts of the novel were published in the New York Times as a short story. In the novel, other bits have been woven around this short story, but it doesn’t feel to me like the graft has taken: it still feels to me like several stories stitched together rather than a single novel.

The Mars Room concentrates mainly on Romy Hall who has just been sentenced and will spend the rest of her life in prison after she killed someone. The novel opens with Romy on a bus on the way to prison and you think the scene has been set for a prison drama. But that prison drama does not develop for a long time because we spend a lot of pages learning about Romy’s past. That’s still OK, except that we seem to be hearing about a lot of characters who are immediately discarded and never heard from again. Good background information, but it starts to get a bit frustrating.

But then we skip to Gordon Hauser who teaches in prisons and ends up at Romy’s prison. There are links, but it feels like we are jumping all over the place.

Then suddenly Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, pops up and there are random bits of his journal included.

Then the main protagonist switches to someone else for a while.

And so on.

I am quite prepared to be told that I am missing the point, but at the moment I just don’t get it.

A gritty novel about the prison system in America. Told from the perspective of different characters.