Everything you need to understand or teach The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.
A work of gritty realism, The Mars Room is also a novel with a strident social critique, chronicling the injustices and barbarities of the contemporary prison industrial complex. Narrated mostly in the first person by Romy Hall, a young, single mother convicted of killing a man who had stalked her and set almost entirely in Stanville prison, a fictional maximum-security penitentiary in California’s Central Valley, the novel indicts the logic behind mass incarceration, and considers themes of American violence, economic inequality, and questions of agency, guilt, and innocence.
