Room: the unputdownable bestseller that inspired the Oscar-winning film

by Emma Donoghue

Now a major Oscar-winning film starring Brie Larson
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize

Jack is five. He lives with his Ma. They live in a single, locked room. They don't have the key.
Jack and Ma are prisoners.

Room by Emma Donoghue is an extraordinarily powerful story of a mother and child kept in isolation, and the desire for, and price of, freedom.

'Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days.' – Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife

• ISBN10: 0330519026
• ISBN13: 9780330519021
• Publish Date: 7 January 2011 (first published 6 August 2010)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Imprint: Picador
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 416
• Language: English

Reviews

[teachergorman]

This is an unconventional form of a review, but Room is an unconventional novel, and my hope is that this will reach Ms. Donoghue’s attention someday, hopefully on a bad day when she needs a pick-me-up.

Dear Ms. Donoghue,
I just finished reading Room, and it made me want to tell you a story. Once upon a time, when I was a sophomore in college, one of my creative writing profs, Vic Bobb, a talented author and innately gifted storyteller, recommended Nabokov's Lolita. He warned me that, when I finished it, I would feel a kind of despair specific to writers. “You’ll realize you’ll never write anything that good.” When I finished it, I was old enough to know I didn’t have the ability to write a book that good at the time, but I was still young and arrogant enough to believe I could one day.

That was twenty years ago. I’ve retained some of that ambition. Maybe twenty years from now I will accept my limitations, but I’m still foolhardy enough to believe my next novel will be better than my last. In fact, I think the one I’m working on now will be pretty damned good. But I’ve read other novels like Lolita where I closed the back cover and understood the kind of despair Bobb was talking about.

When I finished Room, the first thing I did was laugh out loud, a strange, barking, triumphant laugh, while my eyes filled with tears. I was still in the story at that moment, not reflecting upon it, and in that space I could feel I’d experienced a great artistic victory. And then I was immediately reminded of Vic Bobb’s warning about Lolita. I will never write anything as good as Room. I know you don’t know who I am, so this must seem like a low bar, but please know that your hard work earns this kind of response from lesser writers engaged in your craft. I don’t begrudge you that for an instant; I’m grateful you have elevated the form.

Next year, I will teach Room to 17 and 18 year-olds in my creative writing classes. I expect some of them will have the same response to Room that I did to Lolita. “Maybe someday,” they’ll think. And it’s possible one of them will be correct; maybe one day a student of mine will write a book that rises to the level of Room. I hope so. And I thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you,

Benjamin Gorman

[natpatreads]

I would have struggled reading this book. I instead listened to the audiobook format. I found that really made me appreciate the characters more. I could hear Jack as a 5-year-old boy vs trying to imagine it.

[lindsey]

Originally read December 20th - 23rd, 2010.

[brokentune]

Uh-huh.
I'm underwhelmed and baffled, but I'm not sure which came first.
I'm just glad this was a quick read.

[celinenyx]

I picked Room up in a bookstore in Dublin, wanting to support Irish authors when there. I could only vaguely remember it being a very hyped up book a few years ago, and that it was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize (as the cover gently reminded me). The book didn't have a blurb, just a few recommendations. Basically my only knowledge of Room was that it was something about a... room?

Room is narrated by five year old Jack, that has lived with Ma in Room for his whole life. In Room there is Bed, and Duvet, and Sink. They play Track and Corpse, and in the night Old Nick sometimes visits.

Both the strength and the weakness of Room lies in the narration from five year old Jack. On one hand I think it keeps the book from being too gruesome. The nightly visits of Old Nick are only described from the eyes of a young child. If the abuse had been seen through Ma's eyes, Room would become too heavy for a lot of readers. That being said, there is still a big element of horror in reading about Jack and Ma's situation. Reading through other reviews, it's clear that not everyone has the stomach for this.

I think Ms Donoghue put a lot of thought in Jack's voice, and thinking about the way he describes Room I think it was very realistic. At some times though it was clear that it was hard to work within these childish constrains and artifices were needed to tell everything that had to be told. Sometimes Jack's inner monologue had words in it that were too big, even for a highly intelligent well-spoken boy.

Hidden behind the sometimes childish, sometimes uncharacteristically grown up language, there is a lovely, heartbreaking tale of a mother and her son. Room snuck up on me, making me care for the characters. It's often bleak and terrifying, but there is also hope and a lot of love.

[Amber]

I went into Room knowing very little about it. As you may know, I don't read synopses of books that I haven't read, nor do I tend to read reviews unless they're from a trusted source. I like to go in with a completely clean slate. So when I started this and discovered it's told from a young child's perspective, I was a bit thrown off. But in a good way, I promise.

Full review on Books of Amber

[mbtc]

Not sure what I think of this book. It was a good story and the fact that it was told through a child's narrative let you see some things I think you wouldn't have seen from an adult's point of view. However, the child's narrative gets a bit old, fast, even when listening. I imagine it would be that much more tiring to read. A creatively told story, but not a fav of mine.

[Whitney @ First Impressions Reviews]

I recently watched the Diane Sawyer interview with Jaycee Dugard and one word came to mind, why? What would possess anyone to commit such an act? A sick bastard. But Room does not primarily focus on the captor as it is told from the perspective of a five year old boy, Jack, and all he knows is what is in the 12x12 garden shed. Because of this the reader must read between the lines with certain descriptions of events or actions. An example is the screaming game they play every day is really he and his mother screaming for help or the squeaking on the bed is "Old Nick" raping his mother.

The interesting thing about the novel is that instead of building suspense and having the captives escape at the end of the novel they leave close to the beginning, with the book focusing on their life after "Room" and adjusting to life on the outside. This approach had me thinking much more than if they had stayed in the garden shed for the whole of the book because there are so many dimensions to be explored. Both Jack and Ma must adjust to the Outside world, Jack to well, everything and Ma must cope with reentering and resentment for the lost years taken from her.

Room evokes so many emotions, disbelief, anger, sadness and feeling of helplessness. All in a 300 page book. Personally, I think the only thing that could have enhanced Room was if it were told from different perspectives, from Ma, Old Nick or her parents. Lastly, and what really appalled me was that this was semi-based on an abduction in Austria, a father held his daughter in a sound proof room in the family's basement for 24 years and no one being the wiser. Now that puts it in perspective.

I read Room in a day and it is a book that you just can't put down. I highly recommended it.

[dpfaef]

eerie...