Orange is the New Black – Bookclub meeting write-up
All but one of the group had finished the book and we all felt the same about it – it was good but not outstanding. We all felt that it was, in general, very well written and in an engaging style, but we also felt that there were areas which left us scratching our heads, wondering what was going on. Partly this was due to the fact that the author has a habit of jumping around in time without always making it clear that she is doing so, and partly it was due to the fact that we felt the characters were not very well drawn.
We all said that we found it difficult to remember who was who. Apart from Piper and Larry the only other person we could remember was Pop, because she was a central character. All the other prisoners were interchangeable in our minds. We had none of us seen the TV show based on the book and we thought that maybe it would be easier to identify with the characters if we had, as we would then have a picture in our minds of what they looked like. We did feel that there wasn’t enough in the book to make a TV series but somebody said that the TV series was a lot more about relationships, so it would appear that it doesn’t stick religiously to the original text but is more of a development of the characters in the book.
We liked Larry very much and his love and support for Piper came through strongly. We also liked the fact that Piper, her family and her friends were non-judgemental. We felt that we learnt something from the book, which is that there is more to every situation than first meets the eye. The women in the prison were mostly locked up for crimes which their background made it very hard to avoid, and they were mostly not bad people but victims of their environment. Piper obviously felt very strongly the injustice of locking up vulnerable people, teaching them nothing, and then turning them back out into society with very little in the way of advice to help them not return to prison in the future. Her anger at this shone through and we felt that her punishment was to see the effect her unthinking actions could have had on these people. By participating in the drug trade she, who had everything on the outside and didn’t appreciate it, had made life more difficult for these people who had very little but valued what they did have.
We liked the way the prisoners interacted and worked together to make prison life a bit more bearable by sharing what they had, whether that be possessions or skills like knitting or writing. However, we did feel that the overall impression given was that Danbury prison was quite a cosy place to be and, although the loss of liberty and control of your own life was a hardship, because of the way the book was written we didn’t see as much of that as we did of the women being kind to each other and the little pleasures they gleaned from every day. We felt the parts that best reflected the awfulness of what was happening to Piper were the first few chapters, where she has to fact up to her crime and wait to begin her prison sentence, and the final few chapters, where she is locked up in a much tougher prison and cut off from her support group. Although we did feel that, on balance, prison should be more about redemption than punishment we also felt that, the way it was reported in this book, Danbury didn’t really do well on either count and seemed like a bit of a waste of time from the point of view of being an effective deterrent.
Overall this was an easy read but disappointing in parts. We gave it an overall mark of 6.5
All but one of the group had finished the book and we all felt the same about it – it was good but not outstanding. We all felt that it was, in general, very well written and in an engaging style, but we also felt that there were areas which left us scratching our heads, wondering what was going on. Partly this was due to the fact that the author has a habit of jumping around in time without always making it clear that she is doing so, and partly it was due to the fact that we felt the characters were not very well drawn.
We all said that we found it difficult to remember who was who. Apart from Piper and Larry the only other person we could remember was Pop, because she was a central character. All the other prisoners were interchangeable in our minds. We had none of us seen the TV show based on the book and we thought that maybe it would be easier to identify with the characters if we had, as we would then have a picture in our minds of what they looked like. We did feel that there wasn’t enough in the book to make a TV series but somebody said that the TV series was a lot more about relationships, so it would appear that it doesn’t stick religiously to the original text but is more of a development of the characters in the book.
We liked Larry very much and his love and support for Piper came through strongly. We also liked the fact that Piper, her family and her friends were non-judgemental. We felt that we learnt something from the book, which is that there is more to every situation than first meets the eye. The women in the prison were mostly locked up for crimes which their background made it very hard to avoid, and they were mostly not bad people but victims of their environment. Piper obviously felt very strongly the injustice of locking up vulnerable people, teaching them nothing, and then turning them back out into society with very little in the way of advice to help them not return to prison in the future. Her anger at this shone through and we felt that her punishment was to see the effect her unthinking actions could have had on these people. By participating in the drug trade she, who had everything on the outside and didn’t appreciate it, had made life more difficult for these people who had very little but valued what they did have.
We liked the way the prisoners interacted and worked together to make prison life a bit more bearable by sharing what they had, whether that be possessions or skills like knitting or writing. However, we did feel that the overall impression given was that Danbury prison was quite a cosy place to be and, although the loss of liberty and control of your own life was a hardship, because of the way the book was written we didn’t see as much of that as we did of the women being kind to each other and the little pleasures they gleaned from every day. We felt the parts that best reflected the awfulness of what was happening to Piper were the first few chapters, where she has to fact up to her crime and wait to begin her prison sentence, and the final few chapters, where she is locked up in a much tougher prison and cut off from her support group. Although we did feel that, on balance, prison should be more about redemption than punishment we also felt that, the way it was reported in this book, Danbury didn’t really do well on either count and seemed like a bit of a waste of time from the point of view of being an effective deterrent.
Overall this was an easy read but disappointing in parts. We gave it an overall mark of 6.5
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