For those fans of the book that formed the plot of the wildly successful Netflix series (season three will debut in two days on June 12th), orange you glad that IndieReader is offering similar indie titles?
For those of you unaware, the book goes like this. With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who, ten years prior, delivered a suitcase of drug money. But that past has caught up with her.
Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna is now inmate #11187–424—one of the millions of people who disappear “down the rabbit hole” of the American penal system.
From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance.
Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Orange is the New Black offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison—why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they’re there.
If you enjoyed Kerman’s wacky adventure, jump into these captivating indies.
A Journal of the Crazy Year by Forrest Carr
A motorist snaps a horrendous photo of a jetliner plunging from the sky. It’s last day of full sanity on planet Earth. For John Cruz, the horror began the previous day when he awakened to find himself in unfamiliar surroundings. He learns that he’s been in a mental hospital for nearly three years – confined there for a crime he does not remember, a crime the hospital staff refuses to discuss with him. But then he discovers something even more bizarre. While he and other mental patients like him have been mysteriously recovering, the rest of the world has begun a descent into madness, thanks to a mysterious disease that causes many of its victims to go violently insane.
Spilled Milk by K.L. Randis
Brooke Nolan is a battered child who makes an anonymous phone call about the escalating brutality in her home. When social services jeopardize her safety condemning her to keep her father’s secret, it’s a glass of spilled milk at the dinner table that forces her to speak about the cruelty she’s been hiding.
In her pursuit for safety and justice Brooke battles a broken system that pushes to keep her father in the home. When jury members and a love interest congregate to inspire her to fight, she risks losing the support of family and comes to the realization that some people simply do not want to be saved.
Twenty Six Minutes Plus Two by Eugene W. Carr
Small actions can have big consequences. Let’s start with a proposition: What are the chances of your being able to back up and rerun an event that has just happened to you? Let us just suppose for a moment that you could do just that and, in the process, make one small change to what had happened. Would you relive the experience a second time, or even a third? For good or bad, if you had the opportunity to repeat it, making one small change, would you choose to do so? Would you do it again?
A Walk Back Home by Gil Garcia
At the Garcia house, church was an important part of their lives: “Father would abruptly knock three times…and in his heavy Dutch-accented voice bellow out, ‘Wake up, you bums; it’s time for Mass!’ ”
Garcia’s tone throughout his memoir is humorous and affectionate, but not everything he relates about 1940s Los Angeles was idyllic. For example, there was gang violence, polio and child-beating nuns; Garcia even witnessed a Mother Superior punch a grade-schooler in the jaw: “That uppercut would have caught Joe Louis by surprise.” Some readers may find it hard to view the hard physical punishment of small children as tolerantly as the author does; at one point, for example, when Garcia was 3, he messed with his grandmother’s face powder and got “a whack to my butt that would knock a conquistador right out of his armor.” Garcia, who later became a restaurant designer and artist, illustrates the book with his own paintings.
Memoirs and thrillers and crime galore! There is something for everyone in this fearless four spot. Grab your orange comfy pants and get ready to binge read!