This is really frustrating because there was a lot of great stuff in here. 

The footnotes gave a lot of facts that I as a non-US person, didn't know about the US incarceration system. I really liked in a heartbreaking sense, both Hendrix "Singer" Young's and Simon J. "Jungle" Craft's perspectives, but until the ending, I didn't care enough about the main couple. 

A lot of this felt like a slog as we watched the A-Hamm Chain walk from point A to B with no sense of distance, direction or point. And I understand that is the point, it's arbitrary for the sake of the "games", but it remained frustrating to read  and made me not want to pick it up.