Title: Room
Written by: Emma Donoghue
Series: N/A
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publish Date: September 13, 2010
Genre: Adult Literary
Pages: 336
Source: Borrowed from Library
Buy the Book: Room
Synopsis: To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it’s where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.
Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it’s not enough…not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son’s bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.
Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another. (Via Amazon)
Brian’s Review: At the beginning of the year I started a fun new experiment at the library. Each time I go in, I go to the Fiction section and pick out an author I’ve never read. In my first visit in January, I picked an author whose last named starts with A. The next, B. Then C. And so on. It doesn’t have to be an author I’ve never heard of; my rule is that it’s an author whose work I’ve never read before. In late March, it was time for the D author. I had a few choices, but Room looked too good to pass up. I read the jacket and just shook my head. How could author Donoghue possibly pull off a 300-plus-page literary novel told through the eyes of a five-year-old? Just a few pages in, I knew this was going to be a special book. Room is an astounding achievement.
The book is broken up into five sections. The first two sections basically consist of the main characters Jack and his Ma living—surviving, really—in a small jail cell of a room, where Ma’s been locked up for seven years, and little Jack has lived his entire life. We follow them over the course of many days and weeks, as they eat, sleep, read books, fight illness. Imagine, a 5-year-old child who has never seen daylight, has never met someone his age. The TV is his only glimpse at the outside world. Not a whole lot happens in these two sections, but they’re fascinating nonetheless, and they allow for Jack’s voice to develop for the reader. It’s jarring at first, reading something that’s not a children’s book that’s told from the voice of a five-year-old. But somehow, Donoghue makes it work. And it makes us fall in love with this boy way more than a distant third person perspective ever could have.
The third section of the book—the escape—was my favorite. These pages were as riveting and suspenseful as anything I’ve ever read in the book, and reminded me of the joy I had reading Stephen King’s Misery, and Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan. The Count of Monte Cristo is referenced, then utilized, to great effect, and it’s so uniquely effective because they’re told from Jack’s point of view. He’s never even stepped on grass before; never interacted with another human being outside of his mother, and the bad man, Old Nick, who keeps them locked up in the little room. We’ve all read escape scenes in literature, and seen them countless times in movies, but never has there been an escape scene quite like the one in Room.
The fourth and fifth sections detail Jack’s life in the aftermath of his escape. For a while I was thinking the whole book was going to lead up to the escape attempt, but author Donoghue wants to dig deeper, wants to explore what would actually happen to a kid like Jack if he was able to regain normalcy after five years in his closed-off world. It’s absolutely fascinating material. Some of it is dark, and some of it is beautiful, and a lot of it is unexpected. Room took me on a ride that few adult literary novels have in recent years, and it gets my highest recommendation.
