The Great Believers - by Rebecca Makkai - Book Review

Time for a #60secondbookreview! And this week, we'll be discussing "The Great Believers" by Rebecca Makkai.

Five Things I Learned From - Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

The Mars Room by Rachel Kusher - Book Review

#60secondbookreview aka reviewing books as quickly yet thoroughly as I can! And this week's review is for "The Mars Room" by Rachel Kushner.

"The Mars Room" by Rachel Kushner was a two-star read for me, and it's hard to not blame the description writer for some of that. Going into the book it really appealed to me, based on what I had read about it, I thought I would be reading about main character Romy Hall, a woman serving two life sentences in prison, and she is also a mother who is struggling with being away from her child. I'm not totally naive to the hype and also my own preconceived notions of what "female-centric prison stories" look like, I knew that this wouldn't measure up to Orange Is the New Black, for instance. But the reading experience is just SO incredibly different than the description because it leaves out the two other male perspectives that take up a good chunk of the book! Seems like a pretty important thing to include. At its best, for brief fleeting moments, this book did feel a bit like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" where you had this behind the scenes look at the power trips, unfair treatment, and absurdity that runs amok in institutions like these, but then the perspective would change to the other characters that just added nothing for me to the novel. Overall, it was a pretty terrible reading experience.

Have you read "The Mars Room"? Comment down below and let me know what you thought of it! Was it as much of a reading struggle for you as it was for me? Or, drop a comment below with a female prison novel that you really enjoyed  - because I'm definitely open to trying others! Thanks for reading and watching! Have a great day : )