The La Tuna Variant by Michael Good tells a realistic-fiction story of a number of inmates in the La Tuna prison in the United States during a portion of the COVID-19 pandemic. The main character describes his final weeks and days in the prison prior to his release, as well as the impact that COVID-19 had on both the day to day life of the prison, and the inmates' release dates.
The book is relatively short and fairly interesting, but it was missing a few things that I needed to really love it. As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic lasted what felt like an eternity as we lost count of what wave and variant we were currently trying to avoid. The way we viewed and understood the pandemic changed over time, the fear that we felt near the beginning has almost dissipated for most healthy adults and transformed into people attending giant rallies to protest restrictions. As a result, I feel dates and/or clear descriptions about what part of the pandemic characters find themselves in is an essential part of any book about the pandemic, yet this book was not super clear about timelines. For a good portion of the book I thought we were at the very beginning of the pandemic, but I was surprised when suddenly there was a lot of talk about already being vaccinated. Then, based on the title, I figured this was a new variant that was discovered in the La Tuna prison, that was not actually the case, it was just another wave that was brought in to the prison through the staff. I felt a little bit confused or disoriented for a large portion of the book and would have appreciated a bit more information about what part of the pandemic we were talking about.
Pandemic timelines weren't the only storylines that were difficult to follow, the main character's (first?) wife dies(died?) at some point, but I don't know if it was before he went to prison, before he remarried or sometime after and between those two important milestones. The author sometimes used present tense to talk about the main character's wife, but also described her as dead and the first wive, that was also quite confusion. In general, I didn't feel that the author did a great job of giving context and describing characters well enough.
That being said, there was a lot that was great about this book. I think that accurate descriptions of prisons from the perspective of inmates is an area of contemporary literature that is lacking a little bit. I also think that descriptions of the pandemic through vulnerable populations is important. Both of these things were something this author did really well. Demonstrating the impact on prison jobs, isolation, punishment and hygiene practices are all areas that this book was able to open outsiders' eyes to the huge impact a virus has in a self-contained location like a prison. On a non-pandemic related note, I also felt that the descriptions of hierarchy, classes/caste systems and racial segregation/divide were well done and again, offered insight into areas that many readers would not have previously experienced.
In general, I thought this was a good book, quite interesting and relatively easy to follow, with some areas of great detail and other areas that led to some minor confusion for me as a reader. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys novels written in a memoir-style and is interested in reading about characters who experienced the pandemic and/or prison. Thanks to Book Sirens, the author, and publisher for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.