The Prisoner's Wife: A Memoir

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Summary: I Felt this Story because I Live this story
Review: Asha expressed everything that I experieced while loving a man in Federal Prision. Loving a Man that you can hardly touch wears on your soul. Asha was able to make readers understand how hard it is on the inmates as well as the Family. Great Writing!!!

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Summary: Thank You for walking me through this!
Review: Prisoners wife was the book I needed to comfort me when i was going through as the "prisoners wife". If you only knew, Thank god almighty for the gift you hold.

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Summary: A Story of Reality , Self Discovery and Love
Review: asha bandele has provided her readers with a intimate view of her world as a prisoners wife. It is unlike any love story I've ever read. asha and Rashid's love is like a rose growing through concrete. asha takes her readers through her emotions sparing no secrets and exposing her soul for all to see. The book is a conscience raising experience for readers who dare to take the journey.

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Summary: Powerful, Moving, Soul-Searching Love Story...
Review: What a moving story about love and the impact it can have on women, when they are faced with loving a man who's imprisoned. I found this book to very interesting and it anwsered questions, I have about women in that sitaution. It made me question how far I would go for the man I love and what it would mean for me as a woman, wife, mother, etc. I applaud asha for sharing her beauitfully told story and love affair with Rashid. She needed a man like Rashid at that point in her life and he was a blessing. The book shows how she allowed hereslf to see herself in a whole new way, thanks to the bond they shared. He seemed to empower her and he helped her shed some of her own demons. How beauitful is that. Being with him enabled her to grow in strength and spirit. I thought the story was richly-woven and is worth sharing with others. I couldn't wait to tell people about the book. I look forward to reading more from this strong-powerful sister. Thanks for beauitful story that focused on love and it's true power asha.

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Summary: This is truley an exceptional love story!!!
Review: From the very beginning I was captured by the way Asha writes. It is indeed poetry! I too am a wife of an inmate, so I can relate to every emotion she expresses. The lonely nights, watching other couples and imagining that they are you. Just holding on to what could be. This book is brilliant!!! I recommend it to everyone, but especialy to those who are living day to day in the same stuggle. It gave me strength and made me look at my situation from a different prespective.Thank you Asha for showing prison through our eyes and the effect it has on us. The book is an emotional rollercoaster and worth the tears!

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Summary: A Girl Grows in Brooklyn
Review: I can relate to Asha's sadness and inner turmoil, as I am a writer and artist myself. So many of us, young women of color have had our valleys, struggles and rebellions as we approached womanhood. What I value the most about Asha is that she did 'the work.' She did the inner work, on herself, to change her world, her world as she knows it and sees it. The Prisoner's Wife, reads like a personal journal. A woman's journal, how she writes the things she would not tell anyone. This book is brutally honest. It is filled with imagery, passion, romantic longings, personal frustration, loneliness, adventure and joy. This book is her testimony to love as most people would tell us not to love 'with our hearts' and her testimony to journeying through the ugly, bitter, angry, lonely, insecure, sad, abused, confused and creative parts of her inner self. Reading this book puts you in Asha's emotions and thoughts as a young female writer, coming of age, battling her past demons and coming to terms with loving a man who is in the most, so-called , ugly and degrading places a human being could be in , JAIL. She pushes past her doubts, other peoples' opinions of her, and her past, shattered self as an abused girl, to love and love, hard and openly. We all want a passionate, open and honest love that helps us grow. Asha found all of this, within her personal personal love story. This is a love story between a woman and a man, and a love story between a woman and herself, her newfound strong and beautiful self. I like reading about Asha's transformation in Brooklyn. I was born in Brooklyn, but not raised here. Brooklyn has so many colors and worlds, just like our outer world. I appreciate Asha recounting her 'girlhood' and raising herself, before our very eyes, as a girl turned woman, growing up, in love and within a prison frequented love relationships, growing up into a woman who loves herself, in Brooklyn.

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Summary: Beautiful read
Review: Having just finished reading "The Prisoner's Wife," I am filled with emotion right now. BEAUTIFUL memoir that has me feeling like my heart, too, has been broken. Theirs is an incredible love story that had me riding an emotional rollercoaster, swooning and diving with every line, every single word. It touched me deeply, personally, and I will always think of Rashid and Asha. I'll wonder how they're doing, remember what they went through for love and whenever I see this book on my shelf and am reminded of their story, I'll count down the years remaining until they are together and free to love however they choose.
I have to admit that, at first, I was really skeptical, thinking that this was just typical jailhouse love where the prisoner will say whatever is necessary to keep contact with the outside world, get a few letters, some money, etc. But now I see things completely differently. My mind is open now because the love was so very evident on each page. Rashid and Asha share a love so many dream of. It is nowhere near perfect or easy (love never is) but it is definitely beautiful and sweet and heart wrenching and honest.
BEAUTIFULLY written, melancholy AND sweet, I absolutely adore this story and will recommend it to all of my friends.

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Summary: Beautifully written but lacking character growth
Review: asha bandele is a talented writer, and I have to give this book it's three stars for it's beautiful prose and it's sensitive subject matter. I appreciate any book that doesn't have a tired or overdone storyline. Yet there's something about this book that seems a bit shallow to me.
It seems to me asha jumped headfirst into this relationship with Rashid, unprepared for the realities of loving a man in prison. It's not like he went there after they met--he was already there and she should have thought about what she was getting into. Of course you have to deal with loneliness, longing, make do with letters and phone calls that are scrutinized, deal with prison rules and regulations and some insensitive and rude prison employees. What did she expect? She was lucky to get conjugal visits--that is a privilege that not every prisoner enjoys, and so what if it's interrupted by a head count? Does she think she's at the Hilton? If she loves this man SO much, how could she abort his child? (Not to get on any anti-abortion platform here, but I just felt that wasn't the thing to do if their love was as strong as she said it was.) I think one of the editorial reviews stated that asha was "freed" mentally by Rashid or something of the like, but I failed to see it. She seemed just as confused and lost to me at the end as she does in the beginning.
She also seems to blow off Rashid's crime. We learn nothing of any real substance about Rashid, only the things that make him look good. To make him seem like a real and possibly more sympathetic person, I feel we should know the good AND bad, including his crime. If she has as much sympathy for his victim's wife as she says she does, she should fully understand why he was denied parole, why he's in prison in the first place.
I found this book interesting because I could relate from both sides; having a loved one incarcerated and having a loved one murdered. And I can say from experience even when you love someone who's taken a life, no matter how much you love them, you really hate what they've done. You may hate to see them locked up, but you understand why. You would think Rashid is incarcerated for writing bad checks or driving with a suspended license, not for killing somebody. She seems to dismiss what Rashid has done in taking someone's life, not only away from that person, but away from his family. I think if she had shown any growth as a person, she would have realized at some point that she is lucky that the man she loves so much is still alive for her to love. The man he killed doesn't have a chance to love, to see his family, to change his life, or do any of the things that Rashid is free to do. I expected her to accept her situation at the end for that reason alone, but she seems to childishly give up because she couldn't have it her way. It seems pretty silly and naive for her to think things would ever be fully satisfying and rewarding in those circumstances--I've tried to put that off as being young and perhaps not knowing any better, but being an intelligent woman I don't see how she couldn't know.
Although I wasn't very drawn to asha and didn't agree with her, I can say I truly did enjoy this book, for the writing style and her attempt at self-discovery and acceptance, although she doesn't quite make it as far as I can tell.

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Summary: more than a love story
Review: Asha Bandele's The Prisoner's Wife is a wonderfully written tale of her relationship with Rashid, her husband, who is currently serving 20 years to life in prison for a murder committed in his youth. As she says in the beginning, it is a love story. But more than that, it is a moving and precise account of her coming to terms with her own history of sexual abuse. There have been many memoirs written by sexual assault victims describing their recoveries, and memoirs written by incest survivors about the difficulties of their childhood experiences. Sexual abuse has been largely ignored because of the extreme shame many victims feel, and because it is a subject so unspoken about. She does a marvelous job of describing why it can be so hard to realize that abuse is involved, and what it feels like to come to terms with the harm that has been done. A beautiful and moving book.

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Summary: Beautiful, with a blind spot
Review: This book was poetic, honest, powerful, sympathetic, poignant, smart, brave and very compelling. But it left me with terribly mixed emotions. I read it in an effort to better understand my sister, who has spent the past two years in a relationship with a prisoner (to whom she has become "engaged"). She says some of the exact same things about her "fiance" that asha writes about Rashid: no man has ever, ever loved her the way that this guy does, no one has ever made her feel so comfortable to be herself in a relationship, no one has ever been so interested in all the boring minutiae of her everyday life, etc. Isn't that an intriguing parallel? Almost makes you want to grab all the single women in your life and say, "Ladies, don't despair! There ARE men in the world who are loving, concerned, emotionally available, great at listening, infinitely patient with your mood swings, exquisitely attentive to your needs, who have no problems whatsoever with commitment and no ambivalence about proposing marriage and having kids!!!" Isn't it interesting, though, that all these gems of the male species are incarcerated criminals?
It's not just that these men are necessarily (and incredibly) manipulative with the women who are their life lines, their only sources of warmth, tenderness, occasional sex (in the instances that conjugal visits are allowed), and thousands of dollars' worth of collect calls and visits (though surely they are). It's that the conditions of prison -- the intense hunger for emotional contact, the gratitude for it, the desperation and despair, the lack of other opportunities, the rare and precious visits as opposed to the dailiness of real life, etc. -- those conditions *create* the kaleidoscopic, dazzling, perfect love (or the illusion of it) that all these prisoners' wives are waxing on about.
My only problem with this book is its premise: "We have this awe-inspiring love which due to unfortunate circumstances can't be fully realized, but it will conquer all in the end." When the more realistic message would be: "This awe-inspiring love would almost definitely not exist without all the bizarre conditions that prison imposes, and will almost definitely not survive outside of it -- IF my man ever gets out at all."
asha was candid about the fact that this relationship was conceived in a time of great personal difficulty and insecurity for her, that it wouldn't have come about otherwise, and that the strange safety and comfort of her situation allowed her to make important strides in many other areas in her life. I wish asha could say to herself at this point, "This relationship had its own very real brand of beauty and it served a very worthwhile purpose; it enriched my life and undeniably, immeasurably enriched Rashid's life for many years. But that doesn't mean I have to stay in a situation that is uncertain at best and unthinkable at worst for the rest of my youth and possibly the rest of my life."