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The Mars Room: A Novel
The Mars Room: A Novel
The Mars Room: A Novel
Audiobook9 hours

The Mars Room: A Novel

Written by Rachel Kushner

Narrated by Rachel Kushner

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

TIME’S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018

FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL

An instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood—“gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled”—and from Stephen King—“The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny.”

It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, portrayed with great humor and precision.

Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” (The Wall Street Journal), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” (The New York Times Book Review, cover review)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” (Entertainment Weekly).

Editor's Note

New release…

Kushner is a national treasure. Her newest book lurks in gritty San Francisco strip clubs and grim prison cells, but is alive with wit and humanity. A must-read for fans of “The Flamethrowers,” as well as readers of Denis Johnson.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 1, 2018
ISBN9781508244387
Author

Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner is the author of three acclaimed novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K and The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

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Reviews for The Mars Room

Rating: 3.66636848586762 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    3-3.5. I was pulled deeper into this as I went on and as the author went into the character’s inner monologue. Well-written about people whose reality we don’t often consider, how fragile their existence, how poverty and abuse lead to criminalization. While some bark about their “choices,” this lack of empathy and denial of two systems just ensure that stratification continues. No one chooses where or when they are born, who their parents are, or has any meaningful control over these significant factors the first 18 years of their life. Books like this are important if they can bridge a gap, engender greater understanding. I did not like the author’s voice at first, but it just grew into Romy’s voice. And Kim Gordon did the music!! ?

    3 people found this helpful

  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Why the hell did the author narrate this?! Her voice is so painful to listen to I can’t even finish it. Someone really should have talked her out of this. Huge mistake.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Shattering , taut, accomplished, full of sardonic wry hidden wells of wisdom and truth, unnerving and deeply disturbing portrait of what our America has really become for way too many of us.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A bit anticlimactic. Some interesting characters but at the end I was wishing the last 9hrs of listening was refunded to my brain.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Typical liberal viewpoint. Enabling others to get money with no effort and no calling to account is widely touted by the “progressives”. If poverty inevitably leads to crime, why are there many ethical people of low socioeconomic status? Drug abuse, laziness, and a sense of entitlement expecting others to support a life of indolence certainly are main contributors.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Unjustness of American Justice

    Are you of the mind that each person must accept personal responsibility for how he or she leads their life, and that all that befalls them is of their own doing? Or, are you more inclined to think people, yes, must bear a certain degree of personal responsibility, but that they often have little control of many aspects of their lives, from formative years on into adulthood. In The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner speaks to you in the latter group, but she also appeals to you among the formers. People, she seems to say, do not develop in a vacuum, do not live in one either. Society must accept some responsibility for how members turn out, because it’s society that bestows upon people crippling disadvantages and encouraging advantages. In The Mars Room, society as represented by our justice system, doesn’t come off very well when dealing with flawed people it has helped create.

    The novel follows protagonist Romy Hall from the time she enters the California prison system. She had worked as a stripper and lap dancer at a club in San Francisco called The Mars Room to support herself and her child, Jackson. There, she attracted a clientele of men who requested her for lap dances, among them Kurt Kennedy, an ugly brute of a fellow with a leg damaged in a motorcycle accident. Kurt develops an imaginary relationship with Romy and begins stalking her, even after she leaves the Mars Room to avoid him. He finds her, though, and in a confrontation kills him by bashing in his brains. As a result of what she sees as incompetent legal representation by an assigned public defender, she receives two life sentences with added time, ensuring she will never leave prison. Not to put to fine a point on it, is this really justice?

    From the prison bus to incarceration, Romy interacts with a variety of female prisoners all imprisoned for a variety of violent crimes, from robbery/murder to child murder. Kushner portrays everything about their treatment as dehumanizing and their accommodations as second rate, particularly in comparison to what they imagine men receive. Kushner doesn’t have to work too hard to accomplish this, just reproduce the signage and literature from prisons.

    One day, Gordon Hauser appears on the scene. He, in addition to Kurt Kennedy, is a character with his own voice. Hauser, who has encountered difficulty in pursuit of his advanced degree, takes a job at the prison helping women interested earn their GEDs. Prison personnel, of course, deride him. As with all prison employees, at first he undervalues his charges and, like other employees, finds himself being manipulated by the women for their own purposes. Romy, he discovers, is different, an intelligent women who seems to want to learn. He orders her books via Amazon delivered directly to her, as prison rules forbid direct gifts. While Romy does enjoy the books, she hopes to learn about her son through him. At first resistant, he does deliver news to her that proves devastating and propels her into a desperate last act.

    Kushner’s writing here conveys the rawness and brutality of the women’s lives but it is not without humor. If there is a message it’s that society has had a hand in creating these women and has chosen to banish them from its collective mind to a remote dismal prison into an equally dismal geography removed from sight and reach.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In her novel of prison life, Kushner wants the reader to straddle the line here between knowing her characters have done awful things, and yet have sympathy for the brutal treatment they receive. Romy is no innocent--she committed the crime of which she's accused, and her behavior towards her son is not wonderful. But neither does she deserve what she gets in return.

    There's a tricky balance of humor, rage, and pathos here. For the most part, it works, but the rage and open politics of the book (which objectively, I largely agree with) occasionally feel a little too obvious.

    The book shines during its blackly comedic portrayals of prison life--prison cheesecakes, Pruno, and yelling death row inmates. The inmates in Romy's block are serious offenders, many in for long time and abandoned by family, and the bleakness of their situation is evident in the descriptions of that breakdown.

    While the inmates get fleshed out backstories, the prison largely remains a faceless, oppressive entity. The only exception is a continuing education teacher, who struggles to maintain boundaries with the inmates in between reading Ted Kaczynski in his cabin.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The book was a nice change from the books I normally read, it had the real point of view of an American prisoner. The story jumped around a lot and many times I either had to go back and reread something or I would have to think about what happened last night I read about those people. The story does go into details which allows you to paint a picture in your head.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Kushner profits at being able to describe humans and human action (and inaction) well. She's not sporadic nor hyperkinetic in the same style of writers such as Bukowski, but provides details in a kind of languid way. An example of this follows from her intro:

    Chain Night happens once a week on Thursdays. Once a week the defining moment for sixty women takes place. For some of the sixty, that defining moment happens over and over. For them it is routine. For me it happened only once. I was woken at two a.m. and shackled and counted, Romy Leslie Hall, inmate W314159, and lined up with the others for an all-night ride up the valley. As our bus exited the jail perimeter, I glued myself to the mesh-reinforced window to try to see the world. There wasn’t much to look at. Underpasses and on-ramps, dark, deserted boulevards. No one was on the street. We were passing through a moment in the night so remote that traffic lights had ceased to go from green to red and merely blinked a constant yellow. Another car came alongside. It had no lights. It surged past the bus, a dark thing with demonic energy. There was a girl on my unit in county who got life for nothing but driving. She wasn’t the shooter, she would tell anyone who’d listen. She wasn’t the shooter. All she did was drive the car. That was it. They’d used license plate reader technology. They had it on video surveillance. What they had was an image of the car, at night, moving along a street, first with lights on, then with lights off. If the driver cuts the lights, that is premeditation. If the driver cuts the lights, it’s murder.

    The story lulls on from there. An inmate is brought into prison; the reader knows this from the get-go, and learns of her past. Poverty, desperate rushes for resolutions, abuse, addiction, it's all here. In a sense, it's both the ire and stereotypical reactions of prison life contained in this book that makes it semi-good and, at its worst, not more than OK; I missed a lot of the solemnity that can occur in prison.

    Still, this is Kushner's book, and it is OK. She writes very well, and that's what saved the book for me.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    In 2003 Romy Hall starts serving “two life sentences” at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, located in arid Central California. Nothing about Romy’s former life is auspicious. Neglected by her addict mother, she is raped before entering her teens and becomes a drug addict and sex worker. Compared to this, finding steady work at a second-rate San Francisco strip club called The Mars Room seems a step in the right direction, particularly because she now has a son, named Jackson. It is in The Mars Room where she actually seems to find her calling, and, as well, something that resembles fulfilment and, more importantly, independence: she can give herself whatever name she wants, become someone else when on the job and pretend none of that exists when she’s out in the world living her actual life. But nothing ever works out for Romy. When a creepy client becomes fixated on her and begins stalking her, she is forced to leave The Mars Room and relocate to Los Angeles. Problem solved, or so she thinks. But a former friend gives her up, and the client tracks her down in LA and goads her into killing him. The story is told in retrospect, moving back and forth in time, with Romy facing a life behind bars with no hope of parole. Rachel Kushner populates this uncompromising and at times brutal novel with an assortment of female characters facing lengthy sentences, some on death row, and some of the men in Romy’s life, devoting chapters to each of them, which gives the narrative a disjointed feel. Despite the bleak prison setting, the story features plenty of humour, though admittedly of a dark and despairing quality. Stanville, the guards, and the covert underbelly of corruption that thrives within its precincts are convincingly rendered. But the real villain of The Mars Room is a justice system that is ready, willing and able to condemn those who live in the shadows, those who lack resources and opportunity, and those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law because life has made them vulnerable.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Mars Room has many storylines that never really connect. I kept reading to find out about the few characters I cared about, but nothing. I had hoped for a surprise ending, but that didn't happen either. Not a book I can recommend to others.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "The Mars Room" is a sad, elegiac book, and not just because it's main character is set to spend a long, long time in the joint. It's a lament, of a sort, for the character's youth and a loose, chaotic upbringing in post-Haight in San Francisco. It also commemorates a wide-open sort of America that the author suggests is fast disappearing: the reader senses how all sorts of new pressures have hemmed in our lives, from the corrections system to industrial agriculture to the fact that people like the book's narrator simply cannot find a place to live in San Francisco these days. In life, Henry David Thoreau might have been the original hippie to playact being a wilderness type -- he spent a short year on land that Ralph Waldo Emerson owned -- but Kushner's references to him here seem entirely appropriate. The descriptions of the prison system are both detailed and harrowing: I've never spent a day in jail, but it's hard to imagine a more restrictive environment than what Kushner describes here. There are places where I feel she connects her symbols a little too neatly, and other places where she points encouragingly to new spaces that might be opening up, as when she describes the woman prison's first transsexual inmate. And the book is beautifully written, in a graceful, balanced, voice that doesn't sacrifice clarity for emotional resonance. At the same time, that's exactly the problem with the book. The novel's main character makes it clear that she's a reader and has a had more experience with high culture than you might expect, but I was never quite clear on how she got to came by this, especially since we don't hear much about her parents and most of the kids she went to school with seem to have either ended up either in jail or pretty far down the socioeconomic scale. Who got her reading and made it possible to finish high school when so many of the people she knew didn't?, Why is she able to narrate a story like this one so beautifully? This may just be a quibble about realism, but her (first-person) voice doesn't seem to so much as waver, even after spending a few months in what is essentially solitary confinement. It's clear that she's a survivor, but it's hard to imagine that level of emotional resilience is even possible. The answer just might be that Kushner can really, really write has a story that she needs to get across to the reader, which is perfectly reasonable. But I still feel that there are some missing chapters here, a part of this story that wasn't told. I've got some bones to pick with "The Mars Room," but it's a beautiful, readable novel that certainly worth your time if you're interested in where America as a whole might be headed.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The more I read of this perfectly fine novel, the more I struggled to understand the point of the whole enterprise. There’s nothing wrong with the writing and it has valuable things to say about poverty and addiction and the incarceration of young women. It’s just it brought nothing terribly original to the table either. Didn’t Orange is the New Black already cover this ground? I can’t imagine this sticking around for long in my consciousness.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A far easier read than the Flamethrowers, but seemingly less ambitious. Suffers as it comes so soon after Orange Is The New Black, hitting so many of the same beats - white privileged main character, attempts to exploit lonely guards etc. Smarter and more philosophical than the show, but less dramatically rewarding too.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "The Mars Room" is not for the faint of heart, that's for sure, but if you are not overly offended by books that take a frank look at sexual issues (in this case, the sex industry itself), you are going to be absolutely fascinated by it. Author Rachel Kushner has already twice been a National Book Award finalist, and it is easy to see why.The novel's central character is a convicted murderer, and as the book opens, she is being transported to a woman's prison from which she is extremely unlikely to ever leave. Romy Hall is there to serve two consecutive life sentences, and the state of California is determined to make sure that she serve every day of those sentences. This is her story, told in flashback, but several people who play significant roles in Hall's life will also have their stories told in some detail. This is no feel-good novel with a happy ending. This is about life in prison and how the incarcerated population manages to make it from one day to the next. It is often ugly, sometimes heartbreaking, and every once in a while it is even a bit humorous. But reader beware: it is explicit and it is realistic. Just like life.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I knew that The Mars Room was named one of the Best Books of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. I had not read any reviews which, of course, was my big mistake. If I had known the main subject of the book was life in a women's state prison, I would not have read it because I already have enough stress in my life.The novel is composed of some short chapters, really more like vignettes, but some of the chapters were normal size. Maybe this, along with the chapters switching between first and third person, are what made it seem disjointed. The flow was not good throughout. There were too many unnecessary characters which added little to the story.The Mars Room is a club where women give lap dances and the protagonist worked there. She goes to prison for murdering her stalker and is given two life sentences plus 6 years. In the back stories, we learn about her and other prisoner's upbringings. For me, it was gruesome reading as was learning about life in prison. It was hard to have sympathy for the prisoners because of their choices in life although some of them had few choices. It was as though they didn't understand that if you break the law, you pay the consequences.If you want to read about immorality, drugs, prostitution, violence, murder, bad cops, and child neglect, be sure to read this novel. The only good thing about it is that it brings attention to life in women's prisons and when you are in big trouble, unless you can afford a good lawyer, you'll probably end up there.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Unputdownable.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I know it's lazy to describe something as x meets y, but all the way through this I was thinking - Denis Johnson meets "Orange is the New Black". The way that Kushner uses language - and the hopelessness of the lives described - reminded me a lot of Johnson. And I thought of OITNB not just because the story is set in a woman's prison, but also because of the structure - the main story focuses on a woman called Romy Hall, but there are also chapters telling us the backstory of many of the secondary characters.This is significant because for most of the people in this book, it's unusual for them to be seen as a human being. They have spent a lot of their lives being processed by blindly hostile bureaucracies. No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn’t know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.Equally, for the men who go to the Mars Room (where Romy worked as a lapdancer), the women in front of them are not people but fantasies - and most of the women who work there have in their youth encountered men who treated them as means to an end.This book would be almost unreadably bleak if it wasn't so good, and so compassionate towards its characters - not just because of what has been done to them, but because of what they have done. It doesn't pretend that they are angels, but it does recognise that having committed a crime is also something which has a huge impact on the criminal.You go to ad seg and you don’t stop having feelings. You hear a woman cry and it’s real. It’s not a courtroom, where they ask all the pertinent and wrong questions, the niggling repeated demands for details, to sort contradiction and establish intent. The quiet of the cell is where the real question lingers in the mind of a woman. The one true question, impossible to answer. The why did you. The how. Not the practical how, the other one. How could you have done such a thing. How could you.Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Such a different book. The life sentence and the prison scenes were scary. Sounds like it was self-defense and a bad attorney--but was it? There were so many unanswered questions for me in the end. And who was the voice in the chapters with the different print? It bothers me that I still don't know. So did I miss something?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Romy Hall is in Prison, serving a life sentence. This book is her reminiscing about being in county, then the buss ride up to Stanville, somewhere in the Central Valley. She mostly remembers her past--her wild childhood in San Francisco, her years working as a stripper at The Mars Room. The people she knew, the boyfriend who she is still pining over who is out there somewhere. Her son. And she talks about the women she is imprisoned with, their pasts and their present. So, it's OK. I don't quit get why this was shortlisted (or longlisted, really). I also did not love The Flamethrowers, so I think I don't get Kushner.The best parts, for me, were her descriptions of California and San Francisco. The errors, though, drive me crazy. Magic Mountain is not in Ventura County, it's in LA County. You don't go into Ventura County driving from LA over the Grapevine. Is this sloppiness? Or is it meant to tell us something about Romy--maybe she's not as smart as she thinks? But that feels like I am reading way too much into the author's intentions. I am guessing plain old sloppiness.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A disturbing fictionalized look at what often happens to those raised on the "wrong side of the tracks". Where poverty, lack of education, imprisoned family members, crime, addiction, violence and sexual abuse are as common as dance and music lessons, after-school sports, theater and educational vacations. It doesn't always work this way, but the odds are stacked against one born into a family with generational poverty. An engrossing and intuitive story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I enjoyed reading the different perspectives, Tony’s and Gordon’s. The diaries of Ted Kaczynski were a nice edition. I am intrigued by women going to prison, so many of them not deserving to be there. In the age of Orange is the New Black hopefully women who deserve to be free will be released. For people who want to read more books like this, especially nonfiction I recommend Out of Orange, Orange is the New Black, & Inside This Place, Not of It.

    Looking forward to reading more of Kushner’s books.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Mars Room is the second book I’ve read on the Man Booker award shortlist. I had read Kushner’s first book The Flamethrowers and hated it. I don’t think I finished it. This one however is very well-written. It’s about a woman, Romy, a past stripper and drug addict who is serving 2 life sentences for murdering her stalker (no spoiler, this is told in the first chapter). She is devastated by the fact she will never see her son again. Along with Romy’s story, multiple chapters also tell vignettes about the other characters, ie the teacher at the prison, a corrupt police officer in the men’s prison, some of her prison mates and at the end her stalker. It also has multiple excerpts from Ted Kosinki’s journal. The writing is so well-done. The characters have deep introspections about life, nature, society but it always flows with the story. Note: there’s a good amount of violence and very little hope in this one. Not a pick-me-up at all! If you watched Orange is the New Black you can handle it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is well written. The author really captures this culture of prison life. She neither makes these people good or bad, they just are. They are where they are, flawed characters that are also very, very real people. It brings up the question though; does poverty excuse people from being responsible for violent and bad behavior? This is our October bookclub read, I may be adding more to this review after I’ve had time to think about it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    From NPR, It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.Good summary above so I used it. I enjoyed Kushner's novel that depicts the limited choices people have when growing up in certain constrictions of poverty and parental negligence. Besides the main character Romy, Kushner includes some other portraits of note, Houser, who teaches English to the women in prison and then googles them at night to learn their stories, a cop who winds up in the protected part of the prison where bad cops are protected from life among the criminals they shafted. These portraits are gritty and offered without happy solutions. There are ,however, small graces of nobility among the downtrodden. I would be interested to red more of this author's work.Some linesIf you’d showered you had a competitive edge at the Mars Room. If your tattoos weren’t misspelled you were hot property.You learn when you’re young that evil exists. You absorb the knowledge of it. When this happens for the first time, it does not go down easy. It goes down like a horse pill.The captain rode away in his club car, his huge ass like a sideways letter B in his military pants.The defendant, this Johnson, was twenty-one years old. Gunshot wounds. High blood pressure. Chronic pain. He looked forty-eight. I watched as the facts of his life were exposed like pants pockets pulled inside out.Also she was attractive, despite the conditions. Wide-set greenish eyes. A mouth with a cupid’s bow, was that what it was called, an upper lip that swoop-de-swooped. A pretty mouth that said: trust this face. And the face said: this is not what it seems. She spelled well, read with good comprehension. He wasn’t looking for a good speller. He wasn’t looking for anything, among the women in Stanville....I’d never been to the Venice boardwalk, and perhaps taking me there was Jimmy Darling’s own idea of a practical joke. We strolled along, past the sword swallowers and tattoo parlors and piercing salons. The tables with pineapple incense, blueberry incense, and melon oil. Mango and strawberry hookahs. Crunk and old-school hip-hop blared as hippies danced recklessly, swinging their waist-length beards and beads. Homeless senior citizens slept in pools of urine. Shirtless Rollerbladers, fake-baked and sweaty, weaved among the crowds and the indiscreet piles of vomit. People shoved. Children cried. This is awful, I said.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Summary: Following the stream-of-consciousness of a few different characters, this is mostly the story of Romy Hall, who is serving two consecutive life sentences in the California State prison system. Kushner’s story slips back and forth between the now and the past, so the reader slowly learns about how Ms. Hall ended up where she did. It is a gritty, realistic book that gives a fairly accurate view (as I’ve heard from prison inmates) of what women’s prison is like.My Thoughts: I started listening to this right after it made the Booker Prize shortlist. Although I understand perfectly why it made the shortlist (the writing style is superb), I wasn’t overly impressed with the story. Don’t get me wrong…I had emotional investment in Ms. Hall, and felt the other characters were realistic and well-written. And I think Kushner achieved exactly what she set out to do: flawlessly executing the stream-of-consciousness style. I was just in the mood for a story with more plot. But this book wasn’t about plot. It was a book about character and setting. And the characters and setting were superbly written. So I will still give the book 4 stars, even though it wasn’t what I was in the mood for.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Grim reading
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Mars Room
    By Rachel Kushner
    2018
    Simon & Schuster

    Fantabulous!!

    Rachel Kushners masterful style and memorable characters capture the environment and lifestyles within the Stan- ville Womens Correctional Facility in California's Central Valley so precisely and exactly, it's easy to forget this is a work of fiction.
    Romy Hall, the main character is full and complicated. The relationships between prisoners and guards, prisoners and other prisoners, and prisoners with their own selves and personalities, make a statement without being overtly political. Kushner shows us the disparity and abuses of the prison system through the lives and interactions of her characters.
    Rachel Kushner is a master...one of my favorite authors because of her intelligent mastery of ideas and ideals, and her work is always insightful and compelling.
    Mesmerizing. A MUST READ!! Fantabulous.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book tells the story of prison. Deeply. Descriptively. Non-judgmentally. There is a rich and moving story of one woman at the center of this multi-vocal depiction of how a variety of people wind up in prison, how most stay there or return, and how a few "escape." In addition to being a first rate fictional narrative, Kushner's book should be required reading for our politicians pretending to address prison reform. (Brian)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I honestly am not sure about this book. It is a simply told story of a dark side of our culture. Youth, drugs, thoughtless, almost reflexive, violence, prison life, injustice. The Mars Room is a strip club, commonly thought of as a lowlife hangout. But what if it was a safe haven for a young woman trying to start over drug free? Read it and see. No happy ending, so reader beware.