From the Bookshelf of Book of The Month…

The Mars Room

Rachel Kushner

Start date: May 1, 2018

Finish date: May 31, 2018

Why we're reading this: BOTM Judge Siobhan Jones

Don’t read this book if you’re looking for a fun escape! I'm serious. Look, the w…more
[close] BOTM Judge Siobhan Jones

Don’t read this book if you’re looking for a fun escape! I'm serious. Look, the whole team here at BOTM is behind The Mars Room. We think it’s gritty, unapologetic, and searingly memorable. The author has burrowed her way into the oft-ignored world of the women's correctional facility and beckoned us in after to bear witness to hell on earth. Not everyone will enjoy this. But I would argue that the book’s darkness is what makes it so great.

Romy Hall is 28 years old. She’s a mother, a lifetime drug user, and she’s facing two back-to-back life sentences. Through her newcomer eyes, we become brusquely acquainted with prison life: its petty squabbles, inedible cafeteria meals, the sharp-elbowed friendships, and a thousand punitive rules. We also learn her backstory—a neglected childhood, a beer-drenched San Francisco upbringing—and how things went off the rails at a seedy club called the Mars Room.

Okay, you’re thinking, like Orange is the New Black, but not funny? Not quite. This book contains multitudes (diary entries by the Unabomber, for example, or a chapter relayed by Romy’s stalker) that a television show would gloss over. You might not like every narrator. Hell, you might not like a narrative bereft of hope. But The Mars Room offers up one nugget of hard-spun truth after another, dispensed with the snare drum-tight precision of a writer at the height of her craft. It challenges. It dazzles. And yes, it frustrates. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

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What Members Thought

May 12, 2020 Beth Roberts rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: standalone, own, love-the-cover, great-price-drop, hardcover, contemporary-fiction, book-of-the-month-club

This is one of those books. The ones where I give it 4 uncomfortable stars, debating with myself about whether it's actually a 5-star.

I know I'll remember this book and think about it for a long time to come.

Why? First of all, Romy Hall deserves to be thought of. Like so many of us, she started out in not the worst circumstances but things could've been better. She became an arrogant know-it-all adolescent who could do no wrong. She's a product of her environment, for sure. But along the way, s ...more

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Jul 22, 2018 Grace rated it it was amazing

This was a strange, to me, story. I think one of the biggest surprises in reading The Mars Room is that it made me think about a lot of things I’d rather not have to. There were many instances throughout the novel where I felt absolute despair and then there would be a glimmer of light and beauty. On a side note, this is the first book in a while which I finished on my Kindle. I found myself absorbed in the world of The Mars Room.

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