Review Me Twice: Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman

For the first 1/6 or so of this book, I was really interested, totally on board, ready to hear more. For the next 4/6 (or 2/3 if you prefer), I was irritated with Piper for being... I'm not entirely sure what. She didn't seem to be connecting with her situation very well. Granted, she admits that she was very lucky to have high-end legal representation, and people on the outside with far more resources than the loved ones her fellow prisoners had outside, but it doesn't really seem to sink in for her. Until, of course, the last 1/6, where I felt like some kind of redemption happened. She really got it.

I think that maybe if this had been written during Piper's time in prison, instead of after it, the whole book would have a very different tone. She was lucky; she didn't experience any immense hardships or abuse during her year in prison.

Certainly, I learned things from this book. I would love it if more prisoners wrote similar memoirs about their time inside, to present a wide spectrum of experiences and viewpoints. I also appreciated the list of organizations and contacts at the end of the book that address different ways of helping prisoners and their families (my favorite is "Book 'Em," which is Pennsylvania-based and provides books to prisoners and prison libraries).

I wouldn't run around telling everyone I see to read this book, but it is quite good, and if someone asked me about it, I'd say that yes, they should read it.

For a book that's as famous as this one is, and that's been a bestseller for as long as this one has (seriously forever.  It's still sitting on the bestseller list.  I'd say it's been at least a year.) I was expecting a little more out of it.

It took me awhile to get into the book, and then it took even longer to figure out why she had written it.  Thank goodness it's not that long of a book.

However, I admit I grew very attached to the characters, to these women that she spent a year plus with, that she shared some of her most intimate experiances with.  You found yourself rooting for these women in a way you never really thought pssibly and seeing these "criminals" in a whole new light.  Have they done things wrong in their lives, sure, but about half of them would be better suited to a true rehabilitation program.  Or better yet, a program that helps them get jobs and housing and gives them ways to stay off the streets so they didn't have to sell drugs and land themselves there in the first place.

I will admit that the book sheds a harsh light on the growing problem of our prison system.  Kerman's prison had a litany of its own problems and, compared to what she had to deal with when she went to high security prisons in Oklahoma and Chicago, it really wasn't bad in comparisson.  The book showed how much money is wasted on prisons instead of maybe putting it toards our school.  That we incarcerating instead of teaching.

It was an enjoyable book, that I'm glad I read, mainly because I think it's a good idea to read the books that everyone has read, be they good or bad.  But it has been added to my "to be donated" pile.

Author Bio: Melissa Plaut

Welcome to May, the month of memoirs and biographies here at Review Me Twice! This month will make the Monday posts a little bit tricky, since telling the story of the author is basically the same as summarizing the books, since that's the idea of memoirs and biographies.

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Our first author of the month is Melissa Plaut, who wrote a book called Hack, about her choice to start driving a yellow cab in New York. And that's just about everything I'm going to tell you, because you'll hear more about her interesting life come Friday when we review the book!

Review Me Twice: Teen Angst? Naaah...: A Quasi-Autobiography by Ned Vizzini

I read this book for my YA lit class as an undergraduate. I think most recent high school graduates should read it as a way of helping them deal with the transition from high school to either college or "the real world." The book isn't about that transition, but it reflects on Vizzini's high school experience in retrospect, and a lot of people don't stop to do that before moving on to the next stage of life. It can be interesting, enlightening, or just a nice way to let go of things.

Hindsight being 20/20, memory being imperfect, and the unreliable nature of narrators all lend themselves to the fact that Ned Vizzini seems to have had a TV sitcom high school experience. He went to a gifted school (maybe you've heard of Stuyvesant?) and had unique experiences mostly related to his writing, and stereotypical experiences dealing with alcohol and sex. But the way he tells the stories - whether embellished or misremembered or solid truth - is wonderful.

Vizzini had the gift of writing in such a way that makes you feel like you know the guy. Like he's an old friend you just haven't spoken to in a while. And that's what I think made him a great writer: identifiability (which I insist is totally a word now).

I read this book in the same YA literature class that Alex did.  This is the first time that I've read it since then and, honestly, I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't classify it as OMG IT'S THE BEST BOOK EVAR!  It was humorous and I really like how Vizzini's captured high school life.

Honestly, a lot of high school is exactly as he writes it, probably because he was in high school as he was writing these essays.  And considering how young he was at the time, the writing is incredibly impressive.  You realize that he was writing a lot of these for the NY magazine at just 15 or 16 years old, which is pretty awesome if you ask me.

It's a good book to pick up and enjoy, and he is quite relateable, but it's not one I would necessarily put at the top of my to be read pile.

Review Me Twice: I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

Have you ever read a book, and when you're done, you just sort of put it down and go, "I know so much more about this topic than I did when I started reading this book"? That's what I did with this book. My strengths do not lie in politics or history or really even geography, so pretty much everything about the Middle East is a bit of a blur for me. I try to keep up, but I get easily confused and distracted and I don't retain the information well. But apparently all I needed was for a sixteen-year-old girl to explain it to me.

That's another thing I wanted to address, actually... Malala Yousafzai is sixteen years old. She has done more important things than I am likely to do in my lifetime. I know... "important" is subjective, etc. But she's brave and strong and... well, she got shot point-blank in the head by a member of the Taliban and then she wrote this book. That in and of itself should make you go, "Wow, she's awesome." And then you read the book, and you think, "Wow... she's really awesome." And that's obviously an understatement.

So not only is she a great writer, but she also has amazing stories to tell and important information to share. If you think (1) it's too long, (2) you don't like non-fiction or autobiographies, and/or (3) the book is overhyped... give it a chance anyway. It was really really good.

This book really makes you question what you're doing with your life.  Malala is 16 years old and she took a bullet in the head so that other girls in her country could have an education.  You know what I was doing at sixteen?  I'm pretty sure I was sitting on my couch playing video games.

Her story is incredibly inspiring and, honestly, way more insighful than I thought it would be.  You see what kind of things are really going on in Pakistan, and the roles of all the countries involved.  Here's a hint: Americans are not the heroes.  We're the people destroying her country with drones.  I don't want you to take from that, that she's an anti-american girl.  She's not.  She's just as angry with her own country for not doing anything about the invasion of the Taliban.  

Malala focuses on why girls need education, why EVERYONE deserves an education.  She lets you see the positive side of her religion, the way her religion is for the people who aren't terrorist, who really follow the word and spirit of the Quran.  I really liked that part because so often Islam gets distorted by the terrorists.

I also liked that, at the end of the day, there were still so many instances she was a 16 year old girl.  Her favorite color is pink and often dresses in it.  She likes to follow trends and brush her hair and argue with her best girlfriend. 

She's an amazing girl, with an amazing story and she is simply just inspiring.  I recommend this book incredibly and I think it's a great way to start off our new year of reviews.

Memoir: Autobiography with Artistic License

When I read Nic Sheff's introductory disclaimer of sorts to Tweak, I had to remind myself: "This is memoir, not autobiography." But what's the difference?

Memory

"This work is a memoir. It reflects the author's present recollections of his experiences over a period of years."

Those are the first two sentences of Sheff's Note to Readers that precedes the story. This part emphasizes that Sheff could very well be one of those unreliable narrators I told you about last week, and the facts of the story are only as solid as his memory of them. (Considering this is a memoir of a young man with a very serious drug addiction, this is important to keep in mind.) This is the part of memoirs that distracts me while I'm reading dialogue. Part of my brain that I can't shut off keeps asking me, like a pesky kid at a movie, "How does he know that's exactly what he said? How can he put a line of dialogue in quotation marks instead of saying 'we argued about the drugs' when he can't possible perfectly recall the wording?" The point is, it doesn't matter exactly how things were worded or precisely where someone was standing in relation to others, but having read the memoir disclaimer, this was important to the annoying, distracting part of my brain.

Anonymity

"Certain names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed, and certain individuals are composites." 

This is the next part of the Note to Readers, and the part that bothers me once we've been around a character for a while. When Nic has sex with one girl, I wonder if he's compiled several months' worth of trysts into one. When he starts selling meth with one friend, I wonder if there was a whole group working on it. When he describes a celebrity friend's features, work, and connections, I wonder if I'd be able to identify that celebrity with some Googling, or if those details are all made up (and if they are, whether they're similar to the truth or just totally out of left field). I completely understand why "names are changed to protect the innocent/guilty" but it's distracting.

Memoir Vs. Autobiography

You see, memoir is not an autobiography in two big ways.

First, memoir focuses on a slice of the author's life - one event, facet, or perspective - whereas an autobiography is meant to encompass their entire life up to that point: the pie as a whole, if you will.

Also, memoir gets more artistic license. In a memoir, you can change names and combine similar events to get the story moving and omit characters or scenes that don't directly relate to the event or facet you're trying to portray.

Remember the controversy over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces? If you don't, here's the meat of it: he took a little too much artistic license for a memoir. It was originally published and marketed as a memoir, but people found out that too much of it was fictionalized, so now it is a "semi-fictional novel." Really, the whole thing may never have been such a big deal if Oprah hadn't made this her Book Club book.

What Oprah said about the scandal was, first, that she was sorry to her fans and she felt like she had betrayed them, but beyond that, the book was still helpful for recovering addicts, and you can't let the fictional parts get in the way of that.

And that's where memoirs and autobiographies have something in common (other than being based - to some extent - on the author's life): they are usually written to teach or help others who find themselves in similar situations to those the author has faced and written about.