Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison by Piper Kerman

Kerman's memoir is vivid and incisive. This first person narrative is compelling and engaging. I was absolutely fascinated with this book.

The view of drug sentencing and living in a minimum security prison is chilling. You will think twice before even considering committing any type of crime that could land you in prison.

This is a rare book that will NOT be able to put down.

Kerman's writing is honest and eye opening. This would make an excelent choice for a book club.

Grade: A


Synopsis [B&N]

A compelling, often hilarious, and unfailingly compassionate portrait of life inside a women’s prison

When Piper Kerman was sent to prison for a ten-year-old crime, she barely resembled the reckless young woman she’d been when, shortly after graduating Smith College, she’d committed the misdeeds that would eventually catch up with her.Happily ensconced in a New York City apartment, with a promising career and an attentive boyfriend, she was suddenly forced to reckon with the consequences of her very brief, very careless dalliance in the world of drug trafficking.

Kerman spent thirteen months in prison, eleven of them at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, where she met a surprising and varied community of women living under exceptional circumstances. In Orange Is the New Black, Kerman tells the story of those long months locked up in a place with its own codes of behavior and arbitrary hierarchies, where a practical joke is as common as an unprovoked fight, and where the uneasy relationship between prisoner and jailer is constantly and unpredictably recalibrated.

Revealing, moving, and enraging, Orange Is the New Black offers a unique perspective on the criminal justice system, the reasons we send so many people to prison, and what happens to them when they’re there.