Sue Monk Kidd - The Invention of Wings

I was so excited when I heard that Sue Monk Kidd had a new book out. I absolutely loved The Secret Life of Bees, and from the early reviews I read of this one I knew it would be good. I'm never quite sure whether the fact that Oprah likes a book means I will love it or hate it, but this time when I read about her enthusiasm for The Invention of Wings, the things she said about it made me hopeful it would be a case of the former.

As with The Secret Life of Bees, Kidd tackles a big subject here, writing about slaves in South Carolina. Loosely based on the true story of one of a pair of sisters from Charleston, who campaigned for emancipation, racial equality and women's rights, Kidd creates a world grounded in the household of the Grimkes, a large slave-owning family. Sarah Grimke is the privileged young daughter to this family, whose speech impediment and liberal conscience are born out of witnessing the gruesome flogging of one of the family's slaves. For her 11th birthday, Sarah is gifted with a slave girl her own age. Already immensely uncomfortable with the notion of slavery, she rebels against the gift, but Hetty - 'Handful' - remains enslaved.

Against all odds, the girls become fast friends, and the friendship that blossoms between them ultimately changes both of them forever. Sarah overcomes her stutter and her traditional Southern family's values to become a woman whose voice is heard across the nation. Handful, whose lively intelligence and fierce resolve stem from her mother Charlotte, the talented (and rebellious) seamstress to the family Grimke, becomes a key figure in a planned slave rebellion.

Sarah and Handful share the narration of the story as it winds from their childhood towards adulthood, when each becomes an influential force in America's history. And through these two strong figures, Kidd creates a compelling portrait of pre-emancipation life. During my reading, Charleston became a vivid place, from the docks to the industrial centre to the plantations and white-washed properties. The fences - literal and figurative - that surround both Sarah and Handful became almost tangible to me, so that I found myself filled with genuine anger and frustration at the walls that American society put up around women generally, and around slaves specifically.

In the first chapter of this book I was certain I would end up rating it five stars. The writing is extraordinarily powerful and evocative - just stunning, really. The central characters are immediately sympathetic, the story gripping. I read various passages out loud to my husband, convinced I had found one of my books of the year.

Unfortunately, the intensity of the first few chapters is not sustained as the story evolves. Kidd slips into a more sentimental style of story-telling and the book loses something as a result. However, the characters live on in my mind and the story is wonderfully rich. The realistic depiction of some of the horrors of slavery is appropriately horrifying - I had to put the book down, from time to time, to recover from some of the more gruesome episodes. I was moved to tears several times and desperately wanted Sarah, Handful and Charlotte to succeed in their endeavours. This is a big book which will resonate with you long after you turn the final page.

Overall assessment: This was on its way to being my first 5 star book of the year, but by the end I had re-assessed somewhat. Still a fabulous 4.5 out of 5.

Favourite passages: There really are too many too mention, but here are a few.

"It's mother, however, who descends the back steps into the yard. Binah and the other house slaves are clumped behind her, moving with cautious, synchronized steps as if they're a single creature, a centipede crossing an unprotected space."

"I would rove down the hallway to the front alcove where I could see the water in the harbor float to the ocean and the ocean roll on till it sloshed against the sky. Nothing could hold a glorybound picture to it. First time I saw it, my feet hopped in place and I lifted my hand over my head and danced. That's when I got true religion. I didn't know to call it religion back then, didn't know Amen from what-when, I just knew something came into me that made me feel the water belonger to me. I would say, that's my water out there."

"She laid the book down and came where I was standing by the chimney place and put her arms round me. It was hard to know where things stood. People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn't know for sure whether Miss Sarah's feelings came from love or guilt. I didn't know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing. That day, our hearts were pure as they would ever get."

"I saw then what I hadn't seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I'd lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I'd grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There's a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it."

Gabrielle Zevin - The Storied Life of A. J. Ficry

I had never heard of this book, or of Gabrielle Zevin, until I read the glowing review on one of my favourite book blogs, Love, Laughter and a Touch of Insanity. I was looking for something light and short to read in between more substantial books and this looked like it would do the trick.

I have just now finished reading it and wanted to sit down and write a review before the magic wore off. Because this truly is a little treasure of a book. One that I will read again, and which I will keep on my book shelf and take down from time to time like an old friend.

Zevin succeeds in creating a wonderful world of people who come to matter greatly to the reader, whose fates we care about and whose legacies we will remember.

A. J. Ficry owns a bookstore on Alice Island. As the book opens, he is a widow slowly drinking himself to death and sinking his business to the ground. Through a bizarre turn of events, a baby is left in his bookstore, and his decaying heart blooms as he grapples with the basics of childcare ("She's a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times."). A. J. adopts Maya, and the love he feels for his daughter restores him. After reading a book left for him by a quirky publisher's agent named Amelia, he finds his thoughts returning to her messy blonde hair and gauche galoshes, and realises that life may yet hold more in stock for him than he had anticipated.

The quiet world of Island Books is quaint and intellectual and peaceful. Although the characters here do not lead big lives, they are lives filled with love and joy, the point being that this is the essence of a good life. Ownership, materiality, employment - none of this matters, as long as one is blessed with love.

Zevin gets the pacing of the story just right, and peppers the narrative with literary references that will please any bibliophile. Each chapter begins with a note from A. J. to his daughter, a reading recommendation, and through this brief correspondence the reader is able to guess at what twists and turns lie ahead for A. J. Although this epistolary device could have come across as contrived, Zevin's deft hand prevents it from interrupting the story in a problematic way. The writing is soft and unobtrusive, and, at times, surprisingly humorous - for example, when A. J. tells his friend, Chief of Police Lambiase, that "Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no chance but to say you liked it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life." Or when, upon going for a run, A. J. notes that "There are many challenges to long-distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put one's house keys." Or when A.J.'s mother gives Maya an e-reader and he says: "I would rather you have bought my daughter something less destructive like a crack pipe."

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5. I really enjoyed this book, and it will stay with me. A crowd-pleaser. If you love books and bookstores, this is a must-read.

Favourite passages: "A. J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it's love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother."

"We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone."

"We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on."

AUDIBLE

As you all know, I am an avid reader of books both on paper and in electronic form. Until recently I had not thought to add audio books to my rotation. I'm not sure why. They make all the sense in the world. For someone who used to walk to school whilst reading a book (suffering occasional bumps to the head from encounters with lamp posts and the like), and who, as a child, habitually brushed her teeth with a book propped up behind the faucet, you would think this form of reading would be a no-brainer. I guess I thought it was all terribly complicated - figuring out where to buy audio-books, how to listen to them and so on. God, I sound old.

When Audible starting advertising through Amazon and I learned that it was not only easy to download audio-books, but that I could do so using my existing Amazon account and that, moreover, as an Amazon user I would receive one book credit free each month - well, it seemed silly not to try it.

I started last month and have almost finished 'reading' my second Audible book. The first was fiction and I deliberately chose non-fiction for my second, so as to better evaluate the overall experience.

And my initial assessment? Basically: HOW HAVE I NOT DONE THIS BEFORE????!!!

Finally, I can read while I'm driving and while I'm walking to the gym. Audio books conveniently fill the gaps in my time-poor life, making me more efficient.

Recently, even though I've been home with the kids, I have been finding it difficult to fit in a lot of reading. I am honestly in awe of women whose job it is to look after children all day long (their own or other people's) - it is more relentless than any paid job I have ever had. With just one baby to look after I had pockets of time to myself. But with two very little children at home, the opportunity to read while they nap or 'sleep while they sleep' (to quote the common advice given to new mothers) falls away completely. Generally, one of them will wake just as the other goes down. Or else neither naps properly because one seems intent on creating a large amount of noise just as the other starts to droop sleepily on the couch.

Since downloading Audible, my behaviour has changed in subtle but noticeable ways. I find that I will now look for reasons to load up the kids into the car and drive somewhere, anywhere, so that I can fit in some 'reading' time (the kids like it too, by the way; the narration combined with the motion of the car lulls them into soft sleep). I have taken up walking with my daughter in her stroller again, in spite of the bitter cold of this first Canadian winter, and these walks have become far longer than they once were - another time around the block means I get to find out what happens in the next chapter!

This newfound efficiency, a whole new level of multi-tasking, is the most wondrous aspect of listening to audiobooks.

Listening to a book rather than reading it also adds a new dimension: performance. The narrator is vital to the success of a particular audio-book. Luckily I have had good luck with the two I've experienced thus far. I will speak more to this in upcoming reviews, but I can imagine a bad narrator would seriously detract from one's enjoyment of a book.

There are downsides to this form of 'reading'. Continuity is a problem, for one. Even with my increased car journeys and walks, there have been periods of several days when I have not had the opportunity to crack open, as it were, the audio-book I was currently reading. This is not the case with hard copy or electronic books, which I make time for at night even if I can only read one, exhausted page at a time. Because of this continuity issue, and because listening is less conducive to intent concentration than the act of reading, I'm not convinced that I take in as much of the story or the language when I am listening to a book as I would were I reading it in other forms. With the novel that was my first Audible purchase, I ended up buying a hard copy version of the book too so that I could delve into it at home - but then I found that it was difficult to fast forward the audio version to precisely the point where I had left off reading the hard copy. I also really miss being able to flick back through actual pages to remind myself of a particular scene, or re-read a section. This is a problem for me with electronic books too, however.

In spite of these challenges, I will certainly keep using Audible. One thing I have discovered is that it helps me to read books that I might put down for one reason or another if I was reading the hard copy version. I might try to listen to some of the longer books I've been wanting to read but have put on the back-burner because of their size - Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, for example. Big books are hard to lug about, and these days, if I have one going on my Kindle, I'm likely to want a change halfway through and might read another book in between starting the lengthy tome and finishing it. Not great really, my reduced attention span, though probably an inevitable result of today's Twitter- and YouTube-fueled society.

But for precious books that I know I will truly love, I will be reading them on paper (or on screen) - or at least supplementing the audio experience with a hard copy version.

How about you, fellow readers? Have you tried audio books? How do you feel about them?

Dominic Knight - Man vs Child

I didn't review the first book I read by Dominic Knight (his first, Disco Boy) because I know the author. Not well, mind you, but still. It's always a bit tricky, reviewing a book on its merits and trying to separate it from one's personal knowledge of a writer. But I decided to put worry to one side after reading Man vs Child. The book engaged me and I wanted to write a review and decided it was silly not to simply because of personal affiliations. 

One thing I love about Knight's books is that they are unashamedly set in Sydney, Australia. Familiar bars and cafes and suburbs populate the narrative so that when I read this book as a newly settled Torontonian I could imagine myself back home. That's nice. Obviously it won't have the same resonance for people who don't or haven't lived in Sydney, but Knight's novels are a fun way to get a real glimpse of life in that city if you're interested. 

This is a book about a guy trying to make it in the world of stand-up comedy (day job: radio producer) and his relationship with a woman who has a baby, which changes his view on life and commitment and the notion of having kids. It's a funny book, genuinely funny, and made me laugh out loud a few times. The protagonist, 34-year-old Dan, is entirely believable and Knight's writing is confident and strong. I found the narrative addictive, particularly as Dan's radio production job starts to develop into something more exciting.

Like many 30-somethings, Dan finds that his social circle is shrinking as fellow singles hook up, get married, have babies and cease going out or (apparently) having any fun at all. Notwithstanding the pressure from his parents to tick all the right boxes and bring home some grandchildren, Dan is entirely uninterested in the prospect of procreating and can't understand his friends' fascination with their children's most banal activities. But when his old high school crush, Penny, walks back into his life, newly single and toting a toddler accessory, it doesn't take long for Dan to change his tune. Little Lloyd has a soft spot for Dan who suddenly gets how intoxicating it can be when a tiny human being regards you with love and adoration. As Dan's radio career develops and his stand-up takes off, he finds himself dreaming of a family life he had previously eschewed.

It's an absorbing story, a satisfying coming-of-age tale. I always enjoy finding male writers who come to grips with emotions and romance on the page in a light-hearted manner. It's rare, I think. Knight is like an Australian Nick Hornby, and that's high praise indeed, coming from me - I've read all of Hornby's books.

My only gripe with this novel is that Dan's ruminations on his friends' behaviour once they have children are irritating if you are someone who has children. His ignorance of what it's like to have children is understandable, but his total absence of any empathy with parents make it appear as though he is ignorant of more than just the state of parenthood. He comes across as slightly autistic or incredibly self-absorbed, unable to imagine what a change it would be to suddenly have a small being entirely dependent upon you all of the time. Instead of recognizing that his friends might be suffering some shock of their own in undergoing such dramatic life changes, Dan seems to believe that his friends are lording it over him as soon as they have children, that their absence in his life is more to do with their judgement of his life choices than their loss of actual physical freedom. 

It's fine for a character to embody such traits, and I guess it's partly the point of the story. But I experienced a high degree of frustration in moments where he exhibited such an unbelievably extreme lack of understanding for part of the human condition. 

Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5

Pros: Funny, engaging, enjoyable read.

Cons: See above.

Mohsin Hamid - How to Get FILTHY RICH in Rising Asia

Finally, finally, here it is - the review I promised you so many months ago.

I stumbled across this book by accident. I loved Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist but had no idea Hamid had published other books since. I was looking for a new book to read and trawled through my go-to book-related sites (which include various book blogs, Amazon, the Guardian books section, the New York Times and Goodreads). And I started hearing good things about this book with a funny title. In a Booker discussion group on Goodreads, for example, this book joined members in unanimity - they all thought it was a shoe-in for the longlist (in fact it was NOT longlisted, though Hamid has previously been on the shortlist for TRF).  When I saw that it was by Mohsin Hamid, my mind was made up and I lifted my finger for that all-important 'click' which is the simple action of purchasing a Kindle book on Amazon.

It was soon obvious this was a good choice. After reading only a few pages I was in. The story moves at a galloping pace and the portrait depicted of Pakistan is neon vivid. Bearing some initial resemblance to Aravind Adiga's book White Tiger (though that was set in India), How to Get Filthy Rich is the story of a poor boy rising to the heights of corporate success in Asia.

Hamid chooses to tell the story in the second-person, which is quite rare, and he uses an unusual conceit: the book is written as though it were a self-help book. Each chapter doles out a different piece of advice about how to transform oneself from a peasant living in an impoverished rural environment to a wealthy entrepreneur in a big city. There are chapters entitled 'Learn from a Master', 'Work for Yourself' and 'Befriend a Bureaucrat'. Hamid is heavy on the irony and much of the book is darkly comical.

Initially I was resistant to both the second-person narration and the self-help lingo, but I soon fell into the story. The thing about second-person narration is that it forces the reader to become subjectively involved in the story. It personalizes everything. You become the hero. So that when something happens to 'you', we feel like it might be happening to us. It works.

The facade of the self-help book, however, is potentially a different story. Yes, it provides Hamid with the ability to comment, at the start of each chapter, on the plight of those living in modern-day Asia, on the notion of self-help books as a genre (a genre which is parodied here with brutal accuracy), and on the notion of selfhood itself - 'the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one'. It allows him, in short, to ruminate on bigger political and philosophical issues, outside of the story he is telling at the book's core. The obvious problem with this is that it takes him (and us) outside of the story. But the conceit also allows Hamid to tell a story that is bigger than the characters. The characters are devices, in some way; their story is a synecdoche for the greater story, that of Pakistan itself.

Hamid is such an effective story teller that I was never weighed down by lofty political commentary. I was quickly caught up in the vivid coming-of-age story at the centre of the narrative, about a man (whose name we never learn), his quest for success, and the woman he has always loved. It is a tale about what it takes to succeed in a land still weighed down by a deeply entrenched class system and systemic corruption. The frequent interruptions for philosophical musings didn't disrupt my enjoyment of the book. In fact, in retrospect, they probably enhanced it. What might seem clunky and contrived at the start becomes contextual enrichment by the end. Reviewing the book now I realize that it is about so many things - Hamid does so much, so well. This is a love story and a political story. It is a farcical self-help book. It is a book about the notion of 'self', about how fast life moves and how critical it is to seize what is important to you when you have the time to do so. It is also a book about writing and creating fiction. All of this works to keep us readers distanced, to some degree, from the characters central to the Bildungsroman around which all of this is constructed. And yet by the end I was surprised at the extent of my engagement with that story. I was so engaged, in fact, that I was moved to tears by the final scenes.

This is such an original book and, mostly, it works. Hamid is a wonderful writer. I thought of the book several times during our travels, so it has stayed with me. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Adiga's White Tiger, to anyone who likes a good story told in a new voice, to anyone who enjoys a bit of politics spicing up their fiction.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5 stars.

Favourite Passages: 'We are all refugees from our childhood. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.'

'But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood, or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm. Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you'll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of reading.'

On Meeting Margaret Atwood

I have such very sweet men in my life. My darling brother, in search of the perfect Christmas gift for me, asked Bibliohubby for advice and was told that a book was a no-fail idea. Not just any old book, mind you, but a special book by one of my favourite writers, a signed copy or a first edition (for those of you new to this space, I became a proper collector only quite recently, but I am a passionate one). Armed with this information, my brother started an internet search which led him to this golden nugget of information: Margaret Atwood was speaking and signing copies of her new book, Maddaddam, within easy driving distance of us both in November.  Apparently he then told his wife, my sister-in-law, that he had found the best present ever for me, and that he planned to attend the event by himself, buy a book and have Margaret Atwood sign it for me.

Umm...

Fortunately, his lovely wife is an eminently sensible person who pointed out to him that actually meeting Margaret Atwood might be more important to me than the book. She told him I would be mad if I found out that I had a chance to meet her and he hadn't told me (thanks SIL!). So... he told me, and my mum, and we all went along together one night in November to hear Ms Atwood speak.

I'll tell you a secret: I have actually heard her once before. She visited Kingston, Ontario when I was a student at Queen's University. But this was years ago - I won't tell you how many, it will date me.

I was very glad to see her again. Her wit is as sharp as I remembered. She is fiercely intelligent. She speaks quickly and with vigour and great humour. She said the MaddAddam trilogy was designed to be structured like a peace sign or a Mercedes symbol, meaning that the first two books sat apart but not chronologically - narratively. This third and final book is the thread that weaves the two stories together.  To me, this creative structuring is so original that it makes up for the fact that the sci-fi themes running through the books have been seen before in different iterations. I read a review recently (in the Guardian, of all places) to the effect that the trilogy was diverting and well-written, but that it was difficult to read it knowing that one might instead have been reading another book like Alias Grace or The Blind Assassin. In other words, he wishes Atwood would return to writing literary fiction, because he believe that to be a higher art form.

Well. I think Margaret Atwood has earned the right to write whatever she damn well pleases.

After the reading (which was fast-paced and funny - a great teaser for the book itself), I left the auditorium and joined the queue waiting to have my pre-purchased book signed. My brother - again proving his substantial worth - had left the reading a few minutes before, to relieve me of a fussy Miss Lulu, and managed to get in line early so that I had only minutes to wait before presenting my title page for signing.

And then I introduced myself to Margaret Atwood (!) and asked her this question: "If you were publishing for the first time today, would you publish electronically?"

We spoke for some time, enough time that the people behind me in line grew agitated. She said that yes, absolutely, she would have done that - as a teenager, for practice, in a safe space like Wattpad. She said that back then there was no such useful forum to test one's skills, to gain feedback that allowed one to improve as a writer.

But whether she would publish a novel electronically, rather than through a publisher? She wouldn't commit, but she seemed doubtful. "It's difficult to say what I might have done," she eventually said. Inferring: had times been different.

Quite apart from the thrill of meeting Ms Atwood itself, and engaging her sufficiently to have a brief one-on-one conversation, I also found that I completely agreed with both of her sentiments - her enthusiasm for electronic publishing as a testing ground for young new writers, and her obvious reluctance to embrace it as the model for more serious publishing. We may both be proved wrong on the latter point, of course, time will tell.

Let me take a moment, here, to publicly thank my brother for this amazing experience. And I will report back later this year when I have read the book.

Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

This is a rare occasion. I am forced to admit that I read this book because I first saw the TV show, rather than the other way around. I KNOW. I surprised myself, too.

The show is really great, filled with strong female characters and peppered with laugh-out-loud humour. The book is an interesting read, but obviously - because it's REAL - it lacks Hollywood finesse. Piper is not as innocent or as beautiful as her television self, her ex-girlfriend isn't a hot, glowering sexual nemesis, and the other characters lack the charm delivered by the small screen. It's a memoir. If you want more of what the TV show provides, reading this book will not fulfill that need.

For those of you who haven't yet accessed this show on Netflix (and if you haven't, go and do it right now!), this is the true story of a white, middle class, educated woman in her 30s who is sentenced to a year in jail for a drug offence she committed during a post-college experimental phase ten years earlier. Piper is sent to a low security facility, leaving behind her fiancé, her friends and her family. Her memoir is fascinating because she doesn't fit the mould of what we imagine a typical prison-inmate to be. This won't be a surprise to anyone, but most of the female prison population - as described by Kerman, anyway - is made up of low-income, uneducated women of colour. Not because white educated women do not commit crimes, but because for various reasons they tend not to be incarcerated for those crimes as often as their less privileged sisters. As an educated, middle-class reader myself (clearly the type of reader Kerman expected / hoped to attract), it is easy to identify with Piper, and therefore to share her discomfort as she ekes out an existence in such foreign surroundings. It is easy, shall we say, to imagine that we might one day fall subject to the same fate, and that is a scary thought. It makes the read exciting, in some voyeuristic kind of way.

Kerman's anger at the inherent injustices of the current prison system and the lack of equality in the way women from different backgrounds are treated shines through much of her writing. She clearly intends for this to be a polemic of sorts, to make people in broader America aware of the absurdity of a system where low-income women consistently do serious time for petty crime at a heavy cost to the tax-payer, frequently becoming institutionalized and therefore ceasing being able to function as citizens upon release. In order to shore up her argument in this regard, Kerman drops frequent statistics into the narrative. I admire her social conscience but it changes the tone of the book and the statistics are presented without adequate citations or sociological context. Because she tries to write both a diverting narrative and a social diatribe, she ends up doing neither well. As a result of the frequent statistics, the story gets bogged down and there were times when I was bored. Yet the book alone is not sufficiently researched to stand alone as a treatise on the prison system in the United States.

The TV version of Kerman's book makes a social statement without statistics, by providing back story for the characters who are Kerman's fellow inmates, and revealing the hardships that have landed them in their current position. The viewers sympathize with and grow attached to these characters who are merely peripheral in the book. The effectiveness of the show lies in its ability to make viewers laugh at Piper's naiveté and the juxtaposition of her home life against her prison life whilst simultaneously moving us with poignant moments of sadness and futility.

Kerman talks about her fellow inmates in the book, too, but it is generally done from the standpoint of her relationship with them. She doesn't focus enough on describing each of the characters she introduces so that they are distinguishable from one another by name. I often felt quite lost when she referred back to one or other of them.

I did enjoy the way that Kerman's vocabulary and mode of speech changes throughout the book so that by the end it's clear she has evolved as a person during her time behind bars. And I think the story itself is compelling and quite horrifying. It's certainly worth a read, but if you were choosing between the book and the TV show, I would say the TV show is the more enjoyable form of the story (although obviously the book is the more authentic, and it depends what you are after).

Overall assessment: 2.5 out of 5.