4.5★s
“A friend once asked me how I would describe jail to someone who had never been. ‘It’s like being forced to live at the Motor Registry,’ I told him. ‘There are lost of rules that no-one really understands, there’s queues for everything, and everyone is either angry, bored, tired, or a combination of all three.’”

Mr Ordinary Goes To Jail is the first book by Australian author, Wil Patterson. Wil is Mr Ordinary. He could be any of us who falls on hard times and then makes a poor decision. And then another. And a few more. And by the time he’d stolen thirty thousand dollars from his employer, a large insurance company, well, someone noticed. Wil ends up in jail. But Wil is no hardened criminal, even if his hard times are largely of his own making. He has not a clue what he’s in for, as wouldn’t you or I.

By the time Wil has spent nine months in various correctional facilities, he has a lot to tell. And Wil has a talent for the telling. His voice is genuine, candid and redolent of the naïveté one would expect from a first-time inmate. And while some of what he tells is downright scary, there’s quite a bit more humour than you might expect, much of it self-deprecating, so there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. And in the final pages there is a very moving anecdote that is bound to bring a lump to the throat of the toughest reader.

Wil matter-of-factly agrees that a prison sentence is absolutely his just desert for his offence. Retrospectively, he freely admits to being a thief and likens it to an addiction, thus feeling the need to show contrition in the same manner as those attending AA do, apologising to those affected by what some call a victimless crime. Wil has realised that countless people were affected by what he did.

Wil describes not just his time in jail, but also the lead up to his imprisonment and the aftermath: the support of family and true friends, interactions with other inmates and “the system”, getting a job, a home, a family. There is not the slightest hint of “poor me” in Wil’s tale. If anything, he’s ultimately saying “lucky me” when he concedes that his incarceration has allowed him to start over.

And also “…I learned that the darkness doesn’t end at the gates of the jail. You carry something away with you from an experience like prison, and if you try to ignore it, it festers. It’s far better to take it out into the light, deal with it, dismiss what you can, and learn to manage the rest.” This is an interesting, insightful and often funny read.
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by Finch Publishing.