Counseling gems Book

I wanted to like this book, I really did. But I couldn't turn off my editing brain the whole time. First, the afterword about compositing of characters and rearranging of the actual timeline should really have been a preface so the reader already knows that we're being shown essentially staged reenactments. Second, I wish the book had been structured chronologically, rather than loosely grouped into chapters that each vaguely centered a different inmate-- the result was that several anecdotes were told multiple times and the narrative seemed jumbled. Maybe it's just that in 2017 we have multiple seasons of OITNB with nuanced portrayals of women inmates as complex humans, but I also felt like the portrayals of the women in this book (copyright 2001) seemed flat and sometimes cartoonish. I'm also sort of the choir in this case, in that I'm all for arts and education programs in prisons, so maybe the stories here aren't necessarily aimed at me. So it wasn't unpleasant, but I wanted more from the book than what I got, I guess.

(Also, Shakespeare doesn't seem to feature a whole hell of a lot, given the title, but that's as may be)