An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So I picked this up in an Audible sale, saw that it had a billion reviews, and decided to give it a try without even knowing what it was about.

It turns out the title, cover, and story don't feel in any way related to me, so I was in for a lot of interesting surprises with this story. I liked it far better than I expected, based on the title and cover, because this dealt with the impacts of a false conviction. Even though it is called An American Marriage, it's more about the family you're dealt, the family you find, and the family that you make, and how often those are not the same.

There was some extra drama at the end that didn't always seem helpful or to make much sense to me, but I really enjoyed the story overall. It's not really a feel good kind of story, but it definitely gives you things to think about.

I'm really glad I bought this and read it, and I think if you find the cover or title off-putting, just ignore them, as they don't really match what I feel are the truths of this story.

Page: 308

Life or Death by Michael Robotham

(Posted for Paul Mathews)

Audie Palmer spent 10 years in jail for robbery.  Seven million dollars went missing and the before his release, Audie vanishes.

Audio:  13 hrs. 56 min.
Print:  432 pages

Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard by Laura Bates

Laura Bates was an English professor who began teaching Shakespeare to inmates in Indiana prisons. She eventually managed to get the prison system to allow her to teach a Shakespeare class in ‘SuperMax’; the ‘prison within a prison’ for the most violent, incorrigible criminals.

 

In this memoir, Bates describes the “Shakespeare in Shackles” where she met Larry Newton. Newton spent over 10 years in solitary confinement; as a teenager he murdered a man and got life in prison without parole in return for pleading guilty. Newton got Bates’ attention with his first essay about Richard III. He posed questions on topics such as honor, revenge and conscience.

 

The impact of Shakespeare's works, primarily Macbeth and Hamlet,  on Newton was so powerful that he became a teacher, prepared  workbooks to help inmates study, and helped create videos to inform other inmates about the relevance of Shakespeare to their lives. And the impact on  Bates has led her to ask questions such as: Should the state pay for educational programs to rehabilitate criminals? Need we be concerned about the inhumane and unsanitary conditions that exist in some American prisons? Can we prevent juvenile offenders from become career criminals?

 

An interesting read.

 

308 pages

"The Hour I First Believed" by Wally Lamb

Susan M. lent me this book because I had read "Columbine" earlier this year.  At the beginning, the fictional narrator and his wife are working at Columbine High School when two of its students go on a killing rampage in 1999.  The book deals not only with its aftermath and how they each cope but how their lives unfold once they leave Colorado and move back to the narrator's boyhood home, a former dairy farm down the road from a women's prison founded by and named for his great-grandmother.

Part family saga, part historical fiction, this novel is Forrest Gump-ian in the way some of the characters meet and interact with well known figures, such as Mark Twain and Dorothea Dix, and have their lives influenced by real historical events, like Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq.  Throw in a bit of chaos-complexity theory, family secrets, and unpredictable plot twists, and I was hooked.  I don't usually read fiction written by men, but I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed this story.  It took the author about 10 years to write it, and he did a great job.  725 pages (including notes from the author).