Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

I had in the last month subscribed to Netflix, and in doing so, I had heard a lot of the hype about the new original series called Orange is the New Black. I watched the 13 episodes in a matter of a couple of days. I have to say I absolutely loved the show. I looked forward to sitting with my new Kindle and watching each new episode. It was really sad to have it come to an end so quickly because I really had enjoyed it so much. I happened to be listening to NPR one day and heard the show Fresh Air with Terri Gross. Her guest that day happened to be Piper Kerman. She is the woman who wrote this memoir of her year in a Women's Prison. I became even more intrigued with the differences that she was telling Terri about from the book to the show on Netflix. I then decided that I really wanted to hear the real story and see what it was like. I didn't hesitate to go right to Amazon.com and pick up a copy of the new paperback book Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison by Piper Kerman. I am very happy that I decided to get the book written by the person who actually lived the story. I will say that Netflix did an excellent job in creating a very good show that really did a super job in mixing in enough things that were for the entertainment factor of the show. It really didn't go overboard too much but just had the right mix in adding things that made the show seem like the story was really in line with Hollywood and at the same time maintaining enough parts of the truth to the real story that the book tells by the author. I am still reading it, but am going to be finishing it within the next two days and I am loving it as much as I loved watching each new show that came out. I really am hoping that Netflix will pick up the series for a second season just because it is a really different and fun show to watch. I would absolutely recommend this book as well as the Netflix original series to anyone. Piper is a very likable character in the show, and person in true life as she tells her story no holds barred. It is very interesting reading about all the wonderful women that she crossed paths with in of all places a prison. There is a lot of flat out honesty that she just tells her story with. It makes you really like her and most of the women that she became close friends with while she was in the Danbury Women's Prison of all places. It isn't like she had a great time being in prison but the way that she tells her story is very much like what I would think it would feel like if it was me who was in her place. All of the new experiences that she confronts and all the kind women who really helped her in the first few weeks of actually getting used to being in prison and the rules that she has to learn and the way that the "old timers" really did a great job in helping her in those first most terrifying early days when she got there really is very touching and extremely entertaining. I can imagine that she must have stayed in touch with some of the women who were going to be there long after she did her year, so that when it was time for mail every day, some of those incredibly kind and important women that Piper did get to know well are rewarded in getting letters from her I have to believe from time to time. Like I mentioned earlier, I would recommend this book to really anyone who enjoys reading about true life and just likes to read a good book every now and then. It really has been great to pick up at any time and plowing through a couple of chapters in one sitting. I am approaching the end of the book so I will miss it, but I have to say it is very touching and honest and entertaining. And not in the way that you would get any kind of pleasure out of someone else's unfortunate story. It is extremely hard to put down and every time I pick it up, I imagine finishing it. But I honestly like to delay the ending because it is such a great book. I think that it would be a very difficult book not to like for just about anyone. I say go ahead and grab it for the few $$ that it costs as you get your money back in the honest true story that must have been very hard for Piper to write and remember that year she spent in Danbury when she actually sat down to write the book. I have a younger sister who held the job of a Prison Guard, and I don't understand why she became entwined with that work because I have a hard time picturing the sister that I grew up with doing that kind of unpleasant work. She has since gone into the ARMY for a 5 year stay and has been out for about 8 years now and she is working as a cop in a large city. Something that wasn't expected of anyone in our family where members would pass down the badge of courage, because we didn't come from that type of a family who enjoys doing that, passing the baton on to the next member. It was just something that she ended up in as a line of work. I think mostly because of the power that she must feel when she puts on her uniform and gets into her cruiser everyday for work. She has turned into someone who I haven't known as an adult since she came back from Afghanistan and it has been hard to come to terms with the type of person that she has turned into. To know how she has become a very different person than the girl that I grew up with is extremely hard to deal with because I had never pictured her becoming the type of person that she has truly become. I think that it bothers me because I try to figure out what it was that turned her in the direction that she took because we had the same upper middle class life growing up with two parents who truly loved us and that she could come from such a "normal" family and choose to mix with the dark side of prison, then being in the ARMY, and now being a cop. But that is a whole other story itself. I just want to say that I am truly enjoying this book and would definitely recommend it to anyone who is looking for something that is a fast and easy book to read! Happy reading if you decide to get it. I hope that this review will help you lean towards buying it! Enjoy!

Piper Kerman was no criminal. She was not a dangerous woman. She was just a young adult who made some really, really bad decisions. Did she deserved to be punished for her actions? Absolutely. Did she deserve to be sentenced to a year in women’s prison for a crime committed 10 years ago? Not at all. But that is exactly what happened and what happens to many women everyday in the US. I’ve always been anti drugs and anti legalization of drugs including marijuana. And I still hold those beliefs. But whereas before I believed that drug addicts deserved to be confined to prison, I’m not so sure I believe that anymore. Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black definitely helped me to reevaluate my beliefs. Prison is a place that no one ever wants to be. You are completely blocked from the outside world. That seems to be the biggest punishment. You are alone with fellow inmates and your thoughts. Yes, you can have visitors — but they must be approved, your time will be short, and you can’t so much as give them a hug most of the time. This seems to be the harshest punishment in prison. Not that prison is a walk in the park. Living in prison is hard. It’s supposed to be. The food is terrible (unless you’re lucky and there’s extra vegetables at the salad bar that day…then it’s almost manageable), you’re expected to do odd jobs you’re not qualified for (Piper was an electrician…), and you’re treated like a completely worthless, inhuman…thing. Not even a person. I think that there are people out there in the world that deserve this kind of punishment. Child molesters (although I honestly don’t think prison is enough punishment for them…the death penalty sounds best to me), rapist, murders, etc. These are true criminals who do not belong in society. The women detailed in Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black are not murderers. They are not rapists. They are not child molestors. Honestly, they are not that much different from you and I. They just made poor decisions. Piper was a drug smuggler. She bought in illegal drugs to and from the US for a VERY short time. Actually all she did was handle money. She was convicted 10 years after committing the crime. She was living a completely different life at the time, free of drugs and any other crime. She worked very hard and was in a faithful relationship with a man who really loved and took care of her. Piper’s inmates were drug addicts mainly, who were serving very long sentences for possession or violation of probation. They needed help for their addictions. Rehab, therapy, inpatient, outpatient, something that could actually help them. Prison confined them and made it difficult (though not always impossible) for them to obtain drugs…but it didn’t correct the problem. Many of them ended up back in prison right after being released, mainly because while they were treated like criminals (which they weren’t, they were just people who made poor decisions…) they never actually received the help they so desperately needed. Then there’s other inmates with even more mild crimes. Piper talks of one who was serving a very long sentence (I believe it was 5 or 7 years) for Internet auction fraud. E-bay. Have you ever been ripped off of a deal? I think we all have at some point. Did the person who ripped you off go to jail for it? Probably not. They were forgiven and allowed to move on with their life. Why was this girl any different? She made poor decisions…bad mistakes. She deserved to be punished. But by punishment I mean returning the money she stole and being fined and banned from the website(s). Jail? That’s a bit harsh, unnecessary, and ineffective. What I liked the most about Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black is that it allows you to sympathize and relate to people you’d never imagine you could sympathize and relate to. What do I have in common with a prison inmate? Actually quite a few things. I’ve made poor decisions, I’ve made mistakes. I am human. I have feelings. America’s prisons need to be reformed. It’s no secret that they are overcrowded. I now realize why they are over-crowded. It’s not because there’s such a high rate of crime and not enough prisons to fit everyone in. It’s because most of the people in prison really don’t need to be there. Here’s what I propose: Release a majority of prisoners unless they are TRUE criminals (example — murderers, rapists, child molesters, terrorists, etc.) Instead of sending drug addicts to prison, GET THEM HELP. Make them go to intense rehab/treatment facilities, counseling, etc. Drug smugglers, those convicted for fraud and similar minor offenses should be fined. If we start fining more people and limiting the number of people we send to prison we’ll cut down the costs of operating prisons, add more money to the economy, and lower America’s overall debt and help to solve the problem with prisons being overcrowded. I learned a lot from reading Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black. This book completely changed how I view prisons and inmates. I highly recommend this book — it will definitely change how you think. It made me really want to see prison reform and it made me sympathize with inmates and want to help them as an alley. These are issues I never previously cared about and never thought I would want to take action against. I always thought “you do the crime, you do the time”. Now I’m not so sure how much I support that. Have any of you guys read this book? If so feel free to leave a comment about your thoughts!

It's famous now: "Orange Is The New Black." But we know her from Jenji Kohan's Netflix series and writer Piper Kernan is now known merely as "Chapman." To review the series along with Kernan's memoir is to compare "Gone With The Wind" to "The Color Purple." Both 1935. Both Pulitzer winners. Both teach. But one is sensationalistic, marketable, and the other is a well paced, brilliant, honest story of truth. This is the book: The first chapter makes it hard to sympathize with Piper. Her actions are clearly foolish. Thoughtless, even selfish. Yet she claims no excuses. She doesn't claim to be duped; she doesn't claim ignorance and we're pleased when she walks away from the horrific damage of heroin traffic and disappears into SFO, thinking she'll never turn back. Clearly she's forced to. Two Federal agents show up at her door with indictments five years later. This is the first, subtle indication that our judicial system moves at a snail pace. Piper doesn't mention it; we're expected to think. If she must find her way, she leads us to find our own way too, and wisely, since our own transgressions must entangle with growth. Each chapter is both chronological and encompassing. Based on allowing us to glean her lessons through the events that unfold, each chapter tells us what life in Danbury Federal Prison is like but also brings us to a level of understanding about how all people are equally valuable. She brings us closer to the revelations that she learns. She understands that her crime fed the illness and destruction of hundreds of women with whom she now lives and needs. As the book progresses other subtleties arise among the slow day to day humiliations that Federal Prisons enjoy. Her language evolves through the book and becomes "street"- amusing for a Smith graduate. Her love and Alliegence for people for whom she once she gave no second thought becomes beautiful. Her manner of carefully assisting those too proud to show weakness grows more and more. Her ability to write: assist others achieve degrees; letters for appeal; her ability to make "prison cheesecake"(recipe humorously included), her foot rubs to her friend, serving more than a decade, who spends 16 hours a day running the kitchen. (Kate Mulgrew-the acting legend-changes this character for television and though brilliant, it loses some of the love.) piper's support from the outside is not only something that makes her the luckiest inmate, she shares her books, magazines and letters without ego. She conceals great news and also conceals her despondence. And there's a lot of despondence. Piper Kerman spends a lot of time in her head and we're there with her. She never takes for granted the remarkable support from friends and family outside and the reader wishes to find a love and devotion of her fiancée, Larry Smith, who travels from New York City to Danbury Connecticut every single Friday. We all wish to have this unconditional love, and Larry learned of Piper's smuggling vast amounts of drug money at 22 only after she's indicted. It appears that Piper takes over a year of incarceration to learn what Larry knew from the start. Midway through the book we ponder the chance that there will be no denouement. We're wrong. The last seventy-five pages are electric, terrifying, and Piper is forced to face the single piece of history that holds her back. This accelerates until the book ends with the speed and surprise that prison release is in reality. In three paragraphs, Piper is deposited, unreformed by the DOP, unprepared for re matriculation, alone on a strange street in a strange city. Kerman's reason for writing this book is to first answer the constant question, "What's it like?" She states in the paperback afterward that shows like "Oz" and "Cops" are ludicrous exaggerations. So too is Netflix's "Orange Is The New Black." But bad business in Hollywood is unwise. No one wants to be Fredo Corleone. It's clear there's a need for prison reform. The United States represents 5% of the world population yet the United States incarcerates 25% of the worlds prisoners. 90% of US incarcerated are non violent criminals on mandatory minimums (George H. W. Bush's "Three Strikes and your out.") in 1985, the US incarcerated 500,000 citizens. Today, 2.9 million. Piper Kerman took 279 pages to finally appear a hero. The evolution of the book mirrors her own evolution. The addendum is filled with non-profit organizations to help correctional reform. As Kerman said, Prison prepares you for a life in Prison; not for a life on the outside which is why there's a revolving door between Prison and Underprivileged neighborhoods. Imagine if the money we spent on prisons was directed toward schools, libraries, museums. What an improvement. So sure, we may begin this book with a chip on our shoulder, but Kerman makes no excuses, takes responsibility and this moving book has changed and inspired hundreds of thousands. Netflix, Jenji Kohan and "OITNB" is a show worth seeing for brilliance and entertainment, but Piper Kerman's book is in a category head and shoulders above the series and should be on your bed table now.

First, let me just preface this review by stating that I only found out about this book because of the Netflix series, and was interested in finding out how true to the book the show actually is. SPOILER ALERT - the show is much more dramatic that the memoir, which is why the book was a let-down for me. Overall, the book is a smooth read, a lot of characters to keep track of, but I believe to be an accurate reflection of how life in a women's prison was for Piper Kerman. Second, I really enjoyed Piper's writing style and her own perception of her time in prison. I actually really enjoyed how much her time in prison really made her appreciate her upbringing, as well as all the advantages she had in life AND in prison because of her never ending support system. I thought that her accounts of her feelings of fear, restlessness, and uncertainty were believable. I think that this book is important to highlight the difference between the prisons we see on TV shows, prisons we only hear about, and how prisons are in real life. Especially important is how this minimum security women's prison is so different than the "rapey" prisons we immediately think about for seriously hardened criminals. Lastly, I think before you pick up this book, you should NOT watch the Netflix series until AFTER you read the book, a big misstep in my process and the ultimate reason I was disappointed in the book. I wanted more drama, I wanted more conflict, and I wanted Piper to feel like she learned a lesson. I really felt like throughout the entire memoir that she was ultimately pissed because she got caught. Being pissed off for breaking the law AND getting caught is a validated reason to be upset. Piper did reap the benefits of dating a drug lord - exotic and frequent trips around the world, new cultural experiences, and having just about anything she wanted. Putting that life of crime behind you is one thing, but I just really never got the feeling that she was "sorry" for breaking the law. Maybe she isn't. I think I just wanted to feel, as a reader, that she learned her lesson or felt something more than "why is this happening to me?" I got increasingly annoyed from the repeated quotes of "what are you doing here" just because she was white, pretty, financially stable, and college educated. That being said, I think that prison was an unfortunate place for Piper to have such a reality check about her past life decisions, but I think she really grew as a person during her time there, and that she made her time in prison work for her. She learned new skills, was forced to interact with people she probably would never have chosen to interact with (based on how she described her life, I made that assumption), and really came to value the people in her life on a new level.

This book/author does a great job of setting up the experiences before she got to prison. She is the first to point out that she is a privileged white woman thus recognizing the added burden of being a person of color and/or poor and/or lesser to no education. The story is engrossing and yet can be candid, comical and irreverent while still be a serious author. I like the details of day to day experience and we get a rough idea of what it would be like to be in prison, something you'd never have any clue about until you actually have experienced it. There's a mild lull about 3/4 of the way through but she pulls us through and comes around the bend redeeming the story and the author. Hearing the realities also caused me to appreciate the multiple and daily luxuries that we take for granted. That is, closing a door to shower, access to quality food superior to what sounds like the equivalent or less of a grade school cafeteria. Being able to select clothes that fit us, being able to purchase a radio, however cheap and inefficient, whenever you want and not having to wait until you can pay $25 or $50 for items in the commissary that are quadrupled in price. However there is no other way to get/have those items other than purchasing them from the prison supply (if it even gets restocked every again) AND relying on family and friends to send money into your account otherwise no deal, you are out of luck and must endure living a life of minimalism that is forced upon you. Finally, what I find so intriguing is that it ALL revolves around the personality of the person who is currently in charge and available at that moment. Knowing that one guard enjoys playing a power trip on ppl, while another may be a nice person just doing their job. It's the not knowing, the unexpected that can keep up a level of perpetual anxiety. And forget it if you lose yourself for a moment and give some attitude or don't answer in a way that is deemed sufficient, you risk going to solitary, an experience every prisoner treaded like no other. HIGHLY recommened. It's not 5 stars just because of the lull in the 2nd half of the book that was short lived.

minor spoilers Five stars as this was one of those rare books I found hard to put down. That's quite an achievement on the author's part as I find Jane Austen novels tedious, and would have thought to have been terminally bored by a book that's mostly about relationships within a group of women. It's easy to find accounts of torture and murder of inmates by the State in horrific United States prisons - just check out Amnesty International's website. I'm sure you can also find lurid tales of sex starved female prisoners in shady corners of the internet. Piper's account, however, is of neither. She endures a relatively brief stay in a place that's probably benign by US standards. She only experiences some of the true brutality of the United States prison system mercifully close to her release date, and although she does refer sparingly to prison sex, her only sexual experiences are when she is groped by some of the male guards. Understandably nervous at first, she soon finds friends among her fellow inmates, who are not the psychopaths that she might have feared. The book's main theme is the triumph of decent humanity over adversity, as the prisoners create some sort of life for themselves with virtually no resources. A yoga class is formed, Piper logs more miles each day on a running track than most free people ever manage, and numerous petty rules are broken as the inmates devise ways to whip up more interesting meals. Elaborate decorations are fashioned from practically nothing for Christmas and Halloween. Most of the prisoners seem to be far worthier people than their jailers. A secondary theme is the prison administration's total indifference to the welfare of its charges. Little if any intellectual stimulation is provided, and the guards range from OK but lazy to nasty but not vicious. This neglect was sometimes amusing. In one of a series of useless talks supposedly designed to prepare inmates due for release for life outside, the lecture on housing was delivered by a nice but hapless man who discussed aluminium cladding and the best kind of roof for a house. Well, I suppose that was his area of expertise. Piper seems to be remarkably unembittered from an experience that would have left me seething with rage. The only time she is really upset is when the State forbids her visiting her dying grandmother, but she doesn't seem to hold much of a grudge even for that. She's fortunate not to have any children, but describes the trauma inflicted on young children of prisoners who are deprived of their mother's care. It's true that things were far easier for Piper than for the other prisoners. She only had to serve a relatively short sentence, had books and magazines showered on her by many wonderfully supportive friends, and had a new apartment to share with her future husband to look forward to on release. This only goes to show, however, just how bad things were for just about everyone else, most of who would almost certainly have fallen foul of the insane drug laws of the United States rather than committing any real crime. I know that I should be far more angry about Amnesty International's reports on US prisons, but those things are so far beyond everyday experience that they're hard to imagine. By its very ordinary nature, Piper's account is far easier to experience vicariously. A top book by a talented writer

I've read two books this month that really opened my eyes on the impact of the drug trade on the USA. The first was Orange is the New Black. Written by a Smithie who graduated shortly before I arrived there, the book is the memoir of a woman who gets mixed up with international drug smuggling after graduation, then goes straight and goes on to the life you'd expect from a Smith graduate. Then, many years after the incidents involved, the Feds show up and take her to prison. She spends a year and a half in "Club Fed", which isn't as fancy as people have made it sound. That said, she has some experiences with the bureau of prisons that make her realize that "the camp" was a paradise in comparison. At any rate, she herself had her eyes opened to the effects the drug trade had on others, the toll it takes on our society. The majority of the women she is locked up with are minor drug offenders, some of whom are serving long sentences due to sentencing minimums, many of whom are mothers of young children. She writes about how the prison system does very little to rehabilitate or prepare these women for a life outside. Instead, it breaks them down and institutionalizes them, so that they can only handle life behind bars - and then unceremoniously dumps them out on the street with 30 dollars in their pocket and the address of a homeless shelter. She notes that she is treated better at times because of her blond hair, and highlights the racism among the prison staff. However, much of the memoir is funny and uplifting, about the great friends she makes among the other prisoners. Although you'd imagine that as an upper-middle-class, well-educated white woman, she might find it hard to fit in in prison - but she has just the right personality to make it. She is street smart enough that she doesn't come off as snooty, and while she has some of the same fears and thoughts as I would have, she handles herself so well that she becomes quite popular in the prison system. And the other prisoners aren't the hardened cons that you see on Oz - they actually make her feel welcome and it's a great community of women like any other. At any rate, the memoir really shows how the author changed her perspective on life and makes it sound as if, although unfortunate, her experiences being locked up in Danbury gave her some lifelong memories and friends that are _almost_ but not quite worth the experience. I'm glad I'll never be in prison, but I found this book absolutely fascinating and read it straight through in a few days even though I wanted to save it for an upcoming plane trip. After all, the author and I have a lot in common. I am so glad I decided to get a job in technology after graduation, lucky as I was to be graduating into the first Internet bubble. It was fun to be able to place the author's locations, like Northampton Massachusetts. I've even stayed in the Congress Hotel in Chicago (yup, it IS a dump). And of course I remember when the Martha Stewart trial was ongoing. The songs she mentions, and the current events, will make this book something of a time capsule.

Prison fascinates and horrifies me. My favorite TV show is Prison Break, so I thought I'd give Orange is the New Black show a try. While the TV show wasn't for me, I'm glad I read this memoir about an upper-middle-class woman who goes to prison for a year. I had the pleasure of meeting the author at a book reading/signing at a women's prison, and she is lovely in real life. Piper Kerman's real-life story chronicling her year in prison is insightful and thought-provoking. At times the writing impressed me, like this vivid description: "Miss Sanchez had long Frito-chip fingernails painted Barbie pink." There are interesting insights into prison life. "Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the word, a place where the US government not puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient--people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled. Meanwhile, the ghetto in the outside world is a prison as well, and a much more difficult one to escape from. In fact, there is basically a revolving door between our urban and rural ghettos and the formal ghetto of our prison system." My favorite "character" is the Russian wife of a mobster, Pop. Pop is the head cook, and gives invaluable advice to Piper. This story makes the reader inevitably wonder how she would handle imprisonment. I resonated with Piper helping an inmate write a paper. I also would try to fit exercise into my daily routine to stay sane. But really, it's hard to imagine how awful imprisonment would be. The groping from male guards infuriated me: "Other male COs were brazen, like the short, red-faced young bigmouth who asked me loudly and repeatedly, "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" while he fondled me and I gritted my teeth. There was absolutely no payoff for filing a complaint. A female prisoner who alleges sexual misconduct on the part of a guard is invariably locked in the SHU in "protective custody", losing her housing assignment, program actives, work assignment, and a host of other prison privileges, not to mention the comfort of her routine and friends." I like how prison statistics (like one out of 100 adults are locked up in the US) are told factually without a preachy tone. I'm also glad Piper mentioned feeling remorse for trafficking drugs--the very drugs that may have been used by her fellow inmates as part of their crimes. I can get behind the decriminalization of drugs for personal use, but I disagree with the notion that drug dealers are never violent. Overall, a good read, and I'm impressed Piper is giving back by teaching writing to prisoners.

Anyone spending any time online during 2013 will have struggled not to notice a TV series called 'Orange is the New Black', which was the most viewed show commissioned by Netflix (a comedy filmed by Lionsgate) during the year. I had a holiday coming up as autumn approached and for a whole bunch of reasons went straight for Piper Kerman's original book, on which the TV series was based. Which for the sake of clarity will make you smile but unlike the show isn't written for laughs. Piper Kerman comes from a middle-class family, is smart, well educated, is a pretty blond with blue eyes and possessed of a love for male and female partners. She also has an irresistible bohemian itch that leads her on all kinds of adventures and ultimately to jail. During her mid-twenties she couriered drugs money as a favour and to pay a debt to a long term partner. She was arrested for the crime years later, when the drug syndicate collapsed and her ex-partner gave her name up as part of a deal. More than half a decade after being found guilty and being sentenced, Piper finally ends up in jail. The main focus of the story covers her thirteen months in jail. The quality of the novel is that most educated, relatively law abiding citizens, will relate to Piper. She is a largely innocent everywoman, catapulted into the American penal system. And before anyone gets bent out of shape on the question of innocence - if you see this modern world in the black and white of right and wrong, the good and bad, then read on, this book might open your eyes. Aside from the sincerity and lightness of touch in Piper's writing, the human story is what shines through. Piper waves away her fiancee and middle-class life, some ten years after her freely admitted crime, and goes from citizen to con, keeping her head down and trying to stay out of trouble. As she eases into life inside we meet a wide number of characters and rather than the violence you might expect, we are treated to people trying their best to deal with an inhumanity inflicted on them by the system, the size of the system and the futility of jailing people who have few choices in life but to return to that life. It is the interaction of the characters and Piper's enigmatic attempts to deal with these new experiences and the people who change her, that makes this such a captivating read. The last time I read a book that felt this honest and insightful was Belle de Jour, for completely different reasons. There is a very compelling and perceived sincerity in the detail of every page that doesn't sensationalise the reality. The focus here is on the human, a very female story, captivating for its raw honesty. Orange is the New Black is a rare book that has you experience the story, laugh and cry with the characters. We turn the last page grateful it wasn't us but also better for the shared experience. Very highly recommended. I hope this review was helpful.

I read about a book a week, and this was one of my top 5 from last year. Aside from being an extremely easy read, which is not necessarily always a positive, this book packs a message that is important to hear - whether the reader agrees with the author or not. It is full of discussion points on the American penal system and treats all of its characters with respect, which is hard to find. After reading the book, I enjoyed talking with friends about its various facets. This book is rare in such regards. The only real downside to the book is that it is sometimes a little too preachy. Some things should not need to be said directly, but that is really a question of taste. I would recommend it as a gift for people of any political persuasion, because it enables readers to reconsider how we live and challenges some to see others as people.

This book is just so special for me...

Muito bom.ç e chegou bem antes do previsto. Entrega rápida mesmo.

L'article est arrivé vite, neuf, en parfait état. Rien à dire. De plus, un bouquin génial pour ceux qui veulent savoir sur quel univers se base la série mais également l'expérience que peut faire une femme d'une prison de sécurité minimum.