... in which a young woman and her five year old son are kept captive in an 11' x 11' room.
Because the book is told entirely from the perspective of Jack, the five year old boy, the book provides a very different reading experience than is typical. I can understand why the author did this... since the boy is the son of the captive woman and her jailer, he has never known anything other than the inside of this room, and he has never had any contact with any other humans beyond his mother and occasionally their captor. Seeing things from his eyes only (and in his words only) really emphasizes to the reader how confined and enclosed Jack and Ma's world is. For the first half of the book, seeing things through Jack's eyes is a really effective way of making the reader feel the isolation of Jack and Ma's lives. After all, to Jack, only the things in Room are real, and everything he sees on TV is pretend. It's true that the reading can get a little tedious at points... who wants to always be reading a five year old's words? For the most part, though, it works.
Here be spoilers. You have been warned.
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...Perspectives and points-of-view aside, the writing in Room is very good. At 321 pages, it's not a very long book, and because most of the action takes place either in Room or in a hospital, there aren't a whole lot of events requiring extensive explanation. For the most part, it's an account of the day-to-day lives of two people living in extraordinary circumstances, and the unusual nature of their situation and the sympathy that the reader feels for the characters makes the book a very compelling (and fast) read. Andrea noted in her review that reading it in a single setting may have made a different impact on her reading of it. I did read it in a single sitting (most of it very late at night... I finished it around 4 AM), and I can say that while reading alone in the middle of the night probably accentuated the isolation that the characters had in Room, the fast pace of my reading might have also trivialized and diminished their long and tedious ordeal. So, I would probably recommend splitting the reading up over a few days.
This is one book where I feel like I got something out of the supplementary material in the back (the author interview and the discussion questions). The discussion questions added something to my reading experience, even though I'm not in a book club. Emma Donoghue said in the interview that the story wasn't necessarily based on any particular real-life case, though she did draw some basic inspiration from real life cases, like that of Josef Fritzl (at the time of this book's writing, Jaycee Dugard had yet to be discovered and rescued, so that case had no influence on this book). I did consider reading Jaycee Dugard's memoirs before reviewing this book, in case her real account affected my opinion of this book, but her book was not available from the library and I didn't quite want to buy it.
Recommended reading for anyone with an interest in cases like Jaycee Dugard's, or for anyone with an interest in the psychology of prolonged captivity.
4/5 stars (one star docked for the POV thing)
This was a great book with an interesting premise. It gives its readers the perspective of 5 year-old Jack, who has lived his entire life in a tiny room with his mother, a kidnapping and rape victim. It's incredible to see the ingenuity of Jack's Ma, as they cope with the boredom of life in a cage and try to survive the unpredictable whims of their captor. However, the first part of the book does begin to drag, and you begin to wonder how much longer it could possibly go on. Finally, circumstances change, and we get to see how Jack is able to come to grips with a world he didn't know existed. Jack's narration really begins to shine when we see him mentally working through problems he had never confronted before.
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