Room

It is startling how readable Room is considering its intensely unsettling subject matter. I had steeled myself for a gut-wrenching tale of horror (how could it be anything but?), but Donoghue subverts expectations through placing her tale in Jack's hands. Through his eyes, what is horrific to consider becomes a day-to-day normality, and while Donoghue does not shy away from Jack and Ma's circumstances, her insistence in grounding the tale in Jack's limited perspective keeps Room from becoming a claustrophobic tale of horror, and her immaculate skill keeps the story from eroding into a Flowers in the Attic clone (wow, I just made myself shudder at the prospect).

Read the rest of the review here.

Room is one of those books that will change the way you view the world. What if you had grown up only knowing one room and believing that all you saw on TV was from another planet? What if you were a five year old boy who believe that you and your mother were the only "real" people? I think the author's choice of using the five year old as a narrator was particularly brilliant as the reader got to see Outside in an entirely different light. Donoghue used real cases to build a fictionalized tale about a woman and her son in an impossibly agonizing situation. At times, I had to stop reading just so that I could catch my breath from the intensity and the descriptive power of her words made me feel like I was trapped (probably didn't help show more that I read a lot of it on the train). I don't want any of this to put you off reading this book though because I thought it was fantastic (even though it ended rather abruptly for my tastes). In fact, I'll be adding some more of this author's books onto my TRL for the future. :-) show less

This book is a stunner. It captures you from page one and doesn’t let you go until the very end. I’ve never read a book about something this truly cruel before, but wow does it ever prove itself to be more than what it seems.

This book is narrated by 5 year old Jack who only knows the confines of a room. He was born in that room and has never ventured outsides its four walls. Jack’s Ma was kidnapped when she was 19 and has been imprisoned for over 7 years. I had never read a novel narrated by a child before and I was a little skeptical about how that would go, especially as 5 year old kids can only understand and explain so much, yet somehow it works.

Though on multiple occasions I wanted to just grab Jack and tell him to listen to show more his Ma, but I had to remember that he doesn’t understand what’s going on. I really loved this book. Its gorgeous, dark, and frightening. show less

The first half of this is excellent, brilliantly imagined and handled with skill and taste. Really funny as well as horrifying, with all the misunderstandings of the world seen through the child's eyes, for whom 'Room' is the entirety of reality. The second half isn't so good for reasons which it would be a spoiler to reveal, but there were still some good aspects there and I liked the ending a lot. Not at all exploitative of the case as it could have been. Recommended.

Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. "Was I minus numbers?"

Others may not consider ROOM to be crime fiction. It is told in the voice of Jack, who was born in Room, and has known no other environment. His mother has been in Room since Old Nick snatched her off the street when she was 19 years old. So, in contrast to my usual reading where a crime is committed in the pages of the novel, here there is no mystery about the nature of the crime, or about who committed it. For me ROOM was an exploration of the impact of a crime on the victims, in this case on one who wasn't even born when show more the crime was first committed.

It's hard to write about this novel without revealing too much. I would prefer you had the same reading journey that I did, so I'm not going to reveal more. Suffice it to say that it certainly is a novel that makes you think. It also says a lot about human resilience.

For a sizeable book ROOM was an incredibly quick read, at times very poignant, with a number of small puzzles for the reader to solve, as Jack often doesn't explain fully things that have always been part of his life.
Highly recommended.

I read ROOM because it was chosen by my face to face discussion group for this month's discussion book. I was also delighted to realise that I could count it for the Canadian Book Challenge. show less

For some reason I resisted reading this book - I had a vague idea of the subject matter, and knew it was on the Booker short-list 2010, but it just didn't appeal. However at the airport en route to Beijing it was a 'Buy one get one half price offer', and there was a book I did want so I bought it. I am so glad I did. The book is an extraordinary piece of imaginative writing - starting from a point which most of us have read about in the press over the years - a man who imprisons a young woman and treats her as his sex slave and in the process fathering a child who is also brought up in captivity, deprived of all but the most basic of needs. Room is told from the point of view of Jack, the five year old child who lives in confinement show more with his Ma (we never even know her real name). Jack is an intelligent child, and thanks to his mother's brilliant strategies is literate and articulate. However the circumstances of their life together have made him almost autistic.
The book divides into three distinct parts, all narrated by Jack. There is life inside Room, escape from Room, and life outside Room.
Like almost every other reviewer, once I started reading this book I could not put it down. I was horrified, frightened, despairing, hopeful, anxious and uplifted by turns - but most of all, I was thoughtful. The story that Emma Donoghue has written will live on in my mind, and there will be more questions than answers.
This would be a terrific Bookclub choice. show less

Room is a contemporary fiction novel that is entirely narrated by Jack, a five-year-old little boy who has never known any other home besides the room in which he was born and has lived his entire life. His mother, affectionately known as just Ma, was kidnapped at the age of nineteen from her college campus and has been held captive in Room for the past seven years. Many nights, she’s visited by Old Nick, her captor. Jack has never really seen the man, though, because on those nights he sleeps in Wardrobe out of sight. The novel opens with Ma helping Jack celebrate his fifth birthday. Up until that time, she has pretended that the things on TV are just make believe and nothing outside of Room really exists. However, soon after show more Jack’s birthday, Ma becomes concerned that changes to Old Nick’s life may mean that they could be in even more danger, so she starts telling him the truth about Outside and begins formulating a plan to escape. She tells Jack that he must be brave and be her hero. Jack is terrified, but knowing how important it is to Ma, he does as she asks, but it’s really scary. Outside is so much bigger than he ever could have imagined and interacting with people he’s never met before is frightening. He struggles to remember the plan and to find his voice while figuring out how to adjust to a vast, new environment that’s so different than anything he’s ever known before, especially when Ma isn’t there to help him.

Jack is a surprisingly compelling narrator. He’s extremely smart for his age, but not in a way that seemed unrealistic. He’s able to read well and do basic math, but I was able to do those things by kindergarten, too, so it seemed pretty normal to me. Jack is also only six months older than my grandson who while he can’t yet read or do math, has excellent reasoning skills for one so young. I couldn’t help thinking, too, that he’d had his mother’s undivided attention every day, and that although they had meager resources and limited space, she managed to make his life amazingly rich. They played games, made crafts, exercised, read the few books they had, watched TV in limited amounts, and she taught him stories and songs from memory. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that a naturally bright child with daily teaching would be able to do the things he does. It also helps that he’s often confused, sometimes taking things people say literally or just plain not understanding and needing to ask lots of questions. I also loved his innate curiosity. Jack is surprised when Ma starts telling him about Outside and some of the basics of how they came to be in Room. It’s a little hard for him to fathom until he makes it Outside and then it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. Although it scares Jack to think of leaving Room, he finds determination within himself to be the hero Ma needs him to be. But even after their Great Escape, he has to adjust to a whole new way of life that can sometimes be bewildering and other times discomfiting. But through it all, Jack is a wonderful child who is stunningly resilient and adaptable.

Room is very reminiscent of a fictionalized account of real stories like those of brave young women such as Jaycee Dugard or Amanda Berry, only written from the perspective of the child who was born in captivity. It makes me wonder if Emma Donoghue found inspiration for her story from these accounts or others I might not be familiar with. In any case, because of the subject matter that it covers, the book isn’t exactly a happy one or an easy read. However, it is one that allows hope to spring up out of darkness. I’m not overly prone to crying over stories, so it didn’t really hit me in the feels until the very end when I knew that Jack and Ma had finally moved beyond their experience in Room. I’d predict, though, that many sensitive readers might shed many tears over it. Jack’s first-person narration brings a certain innocence to the story as well. He’s too young to fully comprehend what’s happened to his Ma, but we as the readers are very well aware of what’s actually going on. That’s why although it doesn’t contain anything explicit since it’s only Jack’s observations, I’d caution sensitive readers. I have to say that as a writer myself, I was really impressed with Ms. Donoghue’s ability to get inside the mind of a five-year-old and render him in such a way that felt authentic. I was also inspired by the love that Ma has for Jack in spite of the circumstances of his birth and her ability to make life fun and rich for him with make-believe play and activities spawned out of her own memories and ingenuity. Although she clearly has bad days when she’s extremely depressed, somewhere deep down, she didn’t give up on getting out of their circumstances. While some may find Room slow-paced or depressing and while I’ll admit that it isn’t the most uplifting story, I found a great deal of beauty within its pages, mainly rooted in the resilience of the human spirit and the innocent musings of its child narrator. I look forward to watching the Oscar-winning movie adaptation next. show less