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Book review: Interesting read, but lacks presentation

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
11960595_web1_Lowe

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

Fiction

Published: May 1/18. Scribner.

While touching on other prisoner and staff story, The Mars Room mainly follows twenty-eight-year-old Romy Hall. A single mother and former dancer at The Mars Room, Romy is serving two consecutive life sentences in Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility located in California’s Central Valley for killing a man, Kurt “Creepy” Kennedy, who stalked her for months.

Gordon Hauser works as the GED instructor, but he also shows moral and compassion in the novel since the correctional staff couldn’t seem to care less about the inmates. Through his program, he meets and actually befriends Romy.

Then there is Rich “Doc” Richards, who’s a crooked cop sentenced to prison. He is in the Sensitive Needs Unit of New Folsom Prison, protected from the hostile inmates but housed with offenders convicted of crimes against children and transgendered convicts. It appears that Kushner has added this character to be compared to Romy Hall and to show how they both came from an unwholesome background, despite the different paths they took.

What would’ve been a great prison drama, sadly comes up short because of Kushner’s writing. Whether she wrote in a certain style that seemed stoic to add to the whole eerie aura of the story is anyone’s guess.

But for me I found this book so chaotically disjointed — jumping back and forth from the present time to random facts about Romy’s past — it became boring, somewhat confusing and fast. The whole experience was disconnected instead of really connecting the readers with the characters.

Although the presentation may be lacking, Kushner’s themes on poverty, the justice system and how some people who are locked up were doomed from the start because of how they were raised shows. Also, it was interesting on learning the everyday “hustle” of prison life and how the inmates cope.

Kirsten Lowe studies at Athabasca University.