Interesting but Slow-Moving

Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison by Piper Kerman (Spiegel & Grau, 2010, 320pp.)

Piper Kerman had a devoted boyfriend and a promising career when she was arrested in 2003 on a 10-year-old drug trafficking offense, the product of a brief post-college fling with the world of drug smuggling. Her intriguing memoir illustrates prison life in a minimum-security facility over the course of her 13 month sentence. Interesting and often insightful, Orange covers daily interactions with other prisoners and guards, prison food, and the surprising sense of community maintained by her fellow inmates. On the downside, however, the book’s episodic nature sets it at a slow pace, often making it a chore to slog through.

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