Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Didn't everyone really go to high school with Piper Kerman? She is just the stereotypical, little, mean-girl, blonde, who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. She makes an absolutely abysmal life choice, that she shrugs off as happening due to her being bored and adventurous, even though life has given her every advantage, and after 11 years finds herself dropped into the middle of the cesspool that is the American prison system. Piper weathers this storm by cleverly befriending the ethnically diverse group of unfortunate inmates that she discovers are as heartbreakingly vulnerable to being befriended by the homecoming queen with the acid tongue and entitled attitude as the poor homely and uncool girls in any high school in the country would be. Piper is a shameless narcissist. While she is receiving more visitors, mail and commissary money than she knows what to do with from her uber supportive and financially well-off family and friends and benefitting from the best legal defense money can buy, she regales the reader with tales of the poor, UGLY, uneducated, inmates that occupy Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut. These poor woman have suffered from lack of decent legal representation and Lord knows what other horrors in their lives and Piper congratulates herself ad nauseam for being kind to them...which in reality, is really all that she can do to survive in her new environment. I have had this on my TBR list for a long time and decided to finally read it when I heard about the series available on Netflix. I found myself alternating between being disgusted at the vapid Kerman and being just bored and disinterested in the narrative. If you want to read something really compelling about being a woman dealing with being incarcerated, I recommend Wally Lamb's "Couldn't Keep it to Myself". It is a wonderful compilation of stories written by students that he taught in a creative writing class that he volunteered to teach in a women's prison in New York. It is a fabulous book, about these women's lives and how they coped with their inmate experiences, told in their own fascinating words. "Orange is the New Black" is about Piper Kerman...and she is not all that compelling.