I felt honored to listen to this brilliant audiobook as an advanced reader copy from Netgalley and Agate Publishing, and I feel we are all lucky this book found its way to print. This is a first-hand account of life inside Angola Prison told from the perspective of a young inmate sentenced to life there. How he finds meaning in a life behind bars, how any of the men there do, is a story worth hearing.

Unfortunately, having also tried reading the print copy, I must highly recommend everyone consume this book via audio version, as the vernacular spelled out with lots of dropped consonants and Black English is much harder to read than it is to listen to. (I had no trouble hearing the voices speak in that vernacular, but reading it in the Queen's English is tough.) Indeed, the Southern Review of Books reviewer Amy R. Martin notes, "it isn't just the diction, however; it's the rhythm. Fragmented. Staccato. It has a beat. I didn't so much read this book as listen to it. This Life is aural." And while Martin seems to be speaking figuratively as she translated the written word to an aural one in her mind, I urge you to take the aural path to begin with and get this as an audio book.

The book emphasizes the importance of trusted mentors, the tragedy of holding young people accountable for the rest of their lives for idiotic mistakes they made in boyhood (imagine if they did that to all our white sons); the value of family support and found family; the life-affirming significance of having an outlet for creativity in even the darkest conditions (in Lil Chris' case that creative outlet is rap); and the urgent import of reading and books in opening windows for people.

The story tells Lil Chris' story from his entry as a newbie to the Angola culture to his choosing Rise, an older inmate also serving life, as his mentor. Rise thus gets to have the voice of wisdom, guiding Chris through surviving a lifetime of incarceration. He recognizes Chris as "one of the living among the walking dead." And Chris works hard to keep that flame of life burning inside of himself: "Somehow [Li'l Chris] is conscious that these conditions are meant to kill something inside of him. He knows this because he feels whatever it is struggling to live."

Lil Chris, now writing under the name Kunquest, is still an inmate at Angola, where he has been imprisoned for more than 25 years, since 1996. The fact that his mentor, Rise, is released, gives everyone hope, but the real meaning of the book is how to make meaning of a life that may never see freedom. Kunquest has done this, but anyone reading this story will still root for him to get out before he's an old man.

I had a terrible time understanding the narration. I believe the dialect and dialogue cut out huge masses from understanding the story as well as the anger.

There is a great deal of profanity and the N word is freely spewed.

Thank you NetGalley and HighBridge Audio for accepting my request to read and review This Life.