Y’all, this book was amazing. I could not put it down, I utterly devoured it. Maybe I’m just obsessed with the setting of a women’s prison (I’m still fully on board the Orange is the New Black train) but like this book got me. It is so mind-bendingly good, y’all.
Disjointed storytelling is a technique that fails more often than it works, but when it works (and it does here) it is outrageously engrossing. The book starts with our narrator being moved to her new prison where she will serve two consecutive life sentences, no possibility of parole. What Kushner does so well is drive you so deep into Romy’s story that you forget to even look for the surface – I swear, you’re more than a third of the way through the book before you learn what she was convicted of and in all that time you’ve never really thought to ask. It’s just masterful.
Going back to Orange is the New Black, The Mars Room is like if that story had been told from the perspective of anyone BUT the privileged white lady. It’s about the institutional unfairness of the American justice system and a society that does it’s best to make life harder for the people for whom life is already hard enough. It’s impossible to win when the deck is stacked against you, and if you’re playing to not lose, you’ve already lost. I was absolutely nuts about this book and have been recommending it to everyone who will listen (though I worry I’m not accurately framing their expectations when I tell them it’s about a stripper who went goes to prison).