It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside ...Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other. 'Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness. 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 'Room is one of the most profoundly affecting books I've read in a long time. Jack moved me greatly. His voice, his story, his innocence, his love for Ma combine to create something very unusual and, I think, something very important ...Room deserves to reach the widest possible audience' John Boyne 'I loved Room.
Such incredible imagination, and dazzling use of language. And with all this, an entirely credible, endearing little boy. It's unlike anything I've ever read before' Anita Shreve
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.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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10 July, 2011:
Finished reading
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10 July, 2011:
Reviewed