An American Marriage by Tayari Jones has been getting great reviews all year long. There’s even a rumor that it’s going to be made into a movie! The author indicated that she wanted to write a book underscoring the problems of an unfair justice system and mass incarceration, but she wanted to do it from the point of view of a story. The story she created describes what happens in the marriage of Celestial and Roy, when Roy is unjustly convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison. Celestial and Roy are well-educated and modernly upwardly mobile. Although the couple’s home is in Atlanta, they have traveled to a small town in Louisiana to visit Roy’s parents. It’s here, at the one-star hotel (the only hotel in town,) where their troubles begin. It just so happens that a prison in Louisiana is featured last book we discussed, Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward. In Sing Unburied Sing the prison is the infamous Parchman Prison Farm. The characters are rural and poor, where
The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series meets approximately once every six weeks at the Courtland S. Wilson Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library in New Haven, CT.