The Mars Room A Novel

It’s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: the thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials of survival; the leveling rituals of daily life; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living. Romy’s life was defined by the pull of a gritty, neon-lit San Francisco, specifically the Mars Room, the strip club where she once worked. As she navigates her new existence, her story intersects with those of her fellow inmates and Gordon Hauser, a high school teacher who has ended up coaching the incarcerated. The Mars Room is a gritty, heart-wrenching, and darkly humorous exploration of the American justice system and the lives of those it discards.

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