The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
"With this, her latest novel, Kushner draws a dark, gritty picture of California in the early aughts, and manages to find moments of humanity where there seem to be none. Romy Hall is a young mom serving a prison sentence with no hope of parole, and the day-to-day drama of existing inside the broken prison system is a special kind of hell. How much sympathy does someone like Romy deserve? and what makes life worth living in a situation like hers? Dar and sad, yes... but stunningly beautifully written and real." - Recommended by Erika
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.
Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner's work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction "succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive."