Cleary Wolters

The first half of this book is tedious to the extreme. You know the old saying about the fact that sausage lovers should never learn how the sausage is made. Well, when it comes to drug and money smuggling, Wolters describes every bone and piece of gristle that goes into the mix. She travels all over the world and we learn nothing about the countries she visits or what she did there except for one fantastic night in Bali with phosphorescent plankton. One would think a memoir would involve a great deal of introspection, but Wolters concentrates on the surface - we did this then we did that then we got this person to do this with us. Crime can be pretty boring when you get into the details. The second half of the book that talks about her incarceration, trials and release smf finally leads to information that people care about, a little exploration of her reasoning. To make the book even worse, I listened to it in audio narrated by the irritatingly overdramatic Barbara Rosenblat. With every utterance you realize that her motto is "I am an ACTOR!!!" Again, not the tone appreciated in a memoir. If this book hadn't been another take on Piper Kernman's Orange Is the New Black, I don't know if many people would want to read it.… (lisätietoja)

When Orange Is the New Black became a hit Netflix series, the real person behind the fictional Alex Vause was first terrified of being notoriously known and later determined to tell her own story. This is that story.

I read the book version of Orange Is the New Black many years ago and while it's tempting to compare this two works, I will try not to do so too much given that so much time has past. One thing I will note is OITNB was focused much more on the prison system and the reforms needed, whereas this book seemed like a more personal look back at the author's choices. More than half the book is an explanation/justification of how she got involved in drug trafficking in the first place. Given the number of bone-headed mistakes made, it's not surprising the whole "conspiracy" of participants ended up in prison. Wolters does also touch on how the prison system and probation seem to be designed to make people fail, but this is really only a few chapters of the book.

While the content was interesting on the whole and kept me reading, this book really could have used some better editing. There were times when Wolters would go on and on about trivial things, like what they were ordering from the room service menu on an ill-fated drug trafficking trip (too late for breakfast so they'll have to order cheeseburgers, but said far less succinctly than that). Other times, she would skip forward so quickly that things like a supposedly very important romantic relationship is given only a few sentences. Several times it seems like something was referring to a passage that must have been dropped, or somehow just contained an error. For instance, at one point Wolters explains she hasn't seen her parents during the past two years of her incarceration; however, within that same paragraph she mentions her parents' "annual visit" and where in the prison complex she had sat with them the previous year.

The end seemed a little flat, as Wolters fast forwarded so quickly and then only briefly mentioned her job and her sister's on the outside. (This book was a lot more "How I Ended Up in Orange" than "Out of Orange" in actually.) It's fair that she might want to retain some sense of privacy, but given the number of rather explicit details laid out elsewhere, that seems less likely. She also doesn't mentioned what happened to any other of the co-conspirators, although this may be due from lack of knowledge herself.

All in all, this was an interesting enough read, and I would recommend this along with the book version of Orange Is the New Black for fans of the show to get a sense of the real stories behind the fiction.… (lisätietoja)