Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda
Read as part of CBR16Bingo: rage. The rage of women, ex-cons, survivors is centered in this book. The opening chapter contains a monologue on female rage. You ever have an author that you think you should like more? You just try and try with them but they can’t put it together for you? That was Ivy Pochoda until These Women, which I read a couple months ago and will absolutely be in my Best of 2024, with a great shot to place in the top 5. […]
The Inmate by Freida McFadden
And here we go again with Freida! I must’ve been on a rampage in July. I feel like I put a whole bunch of the same kind of books on hold, and then they all come available at once! This book is about Brooke Sullivan, who is a single mom and a nurse just starting a new job at a men’s maximum security prison. She’s not very good at not telling the inmates her personal business. Oh and the man who nearly killed her […]
Inside by Kenneth J. Harvey
Set in St John’s, Newfoundland, Kenneth J. Harvey’s novel is the story of a man, known only by his last name of “Mryden”, who is wrongfully convicted of murder and then released after spending 14 years in prison. The story picks up at the moment Mryden exits the prison gates and we follow him as he adjusts to the alien outside world: a wife who has moved in with her not-so-new boyfriend; a daughter living with her abusive husband; a granddaughter he has never met; […]
Couldn’t Keep it to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters by Wally Lamb and the Women of the York Correctional Institution
The task list for one of my challenges strikes again. Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge includes a book written in prison. I was struggling to decide what to read for this one, I wasn’t particularly interested in reading a book by the type of criminal who would be the type to get a book deal in the first place. Then a bit of internet research led me to this collection edited by Wally Lamb of the work the women of the writing group he co-facilitates […]
Surviving Justice is not so much one integrated story of wrongful conviction and exoneration as it is thirteen completely distinct ones. Thirteen individuals tell their stories in their own words, using their own language and perspectives. They were all given long sentences, or even death. Their convictions were all very serious – murder, rape, child molestation. They were all exonerated, most with the help of the Innocence Project. There were some truly horrific anecdotes (a man arrested for child molestation as he walked to the […]
My first exposure to Margaret Atwood was book one in the MaddAddam Trilogy – Oryx and Crake. It was not a rousing success in my eyes. I didn’t quite get it. Aaaanyway, my library’s app had this in ebook form, so it was my second Margaret Atwood book. I loved it. It was my “reading before bed” book, which is hard when it’s a book that I really enjoy. I find myself dozing when I really want to keep reading. So this is another dystopian […]
