The Prison Book club has become a bit of a For Reading Addicts tradition and we’ve had one for every season since the first. Books have traditionally always been a major part of the show, but season 5 saw a distinct change of pace!
I’m not going to review the season, but I will say it needed more books! Even the book mentions that did take place felt a little slotted in and unnatural to the show. With the tragedy of the librarian, Poussey’s death at the end of Season 4, maybe this was inevitable, but I wasn’t the biggest fan of this season overall.
However, there were a few book mentions throughout the season, so the Prison Book Club fights to live another day. Episode by episode here we go:
Episode 1
Season 4 ended on the verge of riot, and season 5 happily picked up that chalice and run with it! We only saw one specific book mentions in episode 1, Brook grieving Poussey and ‘reading Rilka in German’ but we were glad to see they weren’t rioting in the library! By the time episode 2 started it was clear we were all on the same page as there was an attempt to stop rioters destroying the library.
Episode 4
The next book mention came in episode 4 as the show attempted to humanise the Nazi girls with reference to The Little Mermaid, and how she was technically a princess. It felt like this season did a lot of attempting to humanise Nazis and sadly it felt like there were a lot of racist comments wrapped up as gags too.
The very same episode ends with a séance for Poussey, comical and touching there’s reference to a quote it seems that Poussey wants them to read after the grave. It’s a Maya Angelou quote and it goes ‘She’ll cry and wonder what went wrong’, the book is never named. Some research tells me the line is from a Maya Angelou poem, Poor Girl.
Episode 5
This season had less of the flashback scenes we’ve seen in previous seasons, but there was a pretty good one in Episode 5. We flashback on Janine’s life as she visits a posh school, the class is studying Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
In the same episode Alex and Piper move outside to escape the riot, building a reading nook in the scoop of a digger in the garden. Later in the episode they have a squabble with Piper telling Alex she sounds like an ee cummings poem. Alex is also reading in this scene, but as you can see in the gif she’s broken the spine and it’s impossible to see what she’s reading.
Episode 6
Frieda really comes into her own this season and in episode 6 we see her reading The Gifts of Imperfection as flashbacks to her childhood give her character some depth.
Later in the same episode we see a copy of Cooking for One sitting on one of the bunks.
Episode 6 ends with discussion of Poussey’s favourite book, Alice in Wonderland and flashbacks to Poussey in the library.
Episode 7
The prisoners have all managed to get hold of smartphones in this season, which maybe explains the fewer book mentions. But this is the episode we see Piper and Alex sort themselves into Hogwarts Houses, which is something most of us can relate too! If you’re wondering, Piper is in Slytherin.
We also see one of the prisoners reading in the chapel in episode 7 as they sit quietly with Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep.
This is also the episode the inmates come up with a memorial for Poussey, which ends up being the entire library decorating a whole corridor of the prison, we see a few book titles including a book of Haiku, and another flash of Alice in Wonderland.
Episode 10
By episode 10 the riot is still in full swing, leading Tastee to remark that the inmates are behaving ‘like the pigs on Animal Farm’, she’s not wrong either!
That’s pretty much it for book mentions, but you might want to turn away in episode 13 as special forces storm the prison and regain control. Yes, lots of books were hurt in the making of this episode!
Orange is the New Black is adapted from the prison memoir of the same name.
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