3.5 stars edging on 4 stars. This was a slow grower for me and I liked it so much more at the midway point than when I first started reading.

can't tell if this is like Gritty Realism or just really gratuitous, probably both, but either way it's better than orange is the new black

This was amazing until the last four pages!

I wanted to like it. It seemed like it had all the right elements and the right message. The delivery just doesn't do it for me. I felt no connection to any of the characters until maybe the last 40 or 50 pages. Don't get me wrong, there's good stuff there. You just have to work to find it.

This is 3.5 star read for me... I found it difficult to keep myself engaged in, only because it was hard for me to relate. The main character simultaneously wants to be understood but also mentally runs from her life, so it is hard to want to know what happens/happened. In the end I liked the feel of the writing, I liked the depth of themes, and the way it didn't try to wrap things up tritely. But it's hard to say I loved the book, because I didn't really want to keep reading it at multiple points. So I can say that, objectively it's a good book. Subjectively, it probably isn't for me.

I love the idea of this book and the rough topic. But it just wasn’t for me. It’s an important book, an important topic but I just did not enjoy it. Such a shame.

Rachel Kushner is an author critics adore but her books seem to be firmly average based on public consensus. Having two books of hers under my belt, I have to agree. The first, The Flamethrowers, was a complete mess. There was too much Kushner wanted to touch on, too much was going on and I felt disconnected from the characters, because they weren’t really characters, they were ideas. To me, Kushner’s characters exist because she needs them to tell the story she wants to tell, and if she could write a story with no characters, she would. Reading this, I cared for none of the characters, the same way I cared for none of the characters in The Flamethrowers. Romy especially felt off to me. She was a mother who never would see her son again, because she was serving two consecutive life sentences and she said all the right things about her son and how much she loved him but her words rang hollow. She didn’t feel like a real mother, she didn’t feel like a real person, period. Of course, and perhaps it was inevitable, I was comparing this novel to the wonderful The Enchanted the entire time. Both are portrayals of the prison system, but The Enchanted is absolutely striking. Nothing about that novel feels voyeuristic in a bad way, the way this novel often comes across, especially with the overdone tragic backstories of the inmates. It was a hard to read, but worth it novel. This novel, for me, wasn’t worth the time I spent reading it, unfortunately. I think I’m not going to read any more Rachel Kushner in the future.