Room by Emma Donoghue: A Review

With Room, author Emma Donoghue has brought us the story of Jack and Ma, a chillingly illicit tale of imprisonment, love, and survival. Room is half thriller, half lullaby and timed to the most unnervingly modern of cultural heartbeats. Told in the voice of five year old Jack, is the story of the young boy's life in an 11 by 11 square foot shed. Jack lives peacefully, never quite aware of the growing desperation of his 26 year old mother, who was snatched on her way to the library seven years earlier and trapped in Room by the harsh and mysterious and "Old Nick."

Most chillingly personal to me was his mother's age - mine exactly at the time I was reading Room. With references to the early 2000's when I myself was a college student, I found myself many times in his mother's shoes, vibrant, young and vulnerable. How easily could his mother's plight have become mine? How easily could it have belonged to many close friends?

Jack is confused and mesmerized about the things his mother talks about from her old life "Outside" - Everything from iPods and Facebook to hammocks and grass. Donoghue at once touches on the innocence and frivolity of the free world.

In Room, Jack and his mother are provided with a few small pleasures- Books - such as Twilight and The Da Vinci Code, an analog television set, where they watch everything from Dora the Explorer to Lady GaGa and Kayne West. As I said, the novel's timing is dead-on, and the constant cultural references are sure to hit close to home for most readers.

Jack is often revealing the sometimes subtle, sometimes blindingly obvious truth without ever fully realizing it himself. (In that familiar way children often do.) It is along with Jack's own growing awareness that the true horror of his mother's experience becomes apparent to the reader.

And so the novel begins here, with Jack' s peaceful world shifting into something that can't contain him or his mother much longer -- it is here that this reluctant little hero's epic journey begins, and with Jack's help, Donoghue will take readers on a trip they won't soon forget.

Comments

  1. This book did not interest me in the beginning. However, I stuck with it and it turned out to be FABULOUS. I was very intrigued by the characters and the situation. The author did a fantastic job developing the plot and creating a wonderfully real story. There were a few parts in the book that I had a difficult time believing, but for the most part it was believable. This book was a GREAT read.

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