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A Novel
by Emma Donoghue
Book Reviewed by:To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world....
Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience - and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.
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.
Excerpt
Room
When she spits the second time it's my go with Toothbrush, I scrub each my teeth all the way around. Ma's spit in Sink doesn't look a bit like me, mine doesn't either. I wash them away and make a vampire smile.
"Argh." Ma covers her eyes. "Your teeth are so clean, they're dazzling me."
Her ones are pretty rotted because she forgetted to brush them, she's sorry and she doesn't forget anymore but they're still rotted.
I flat the chairs and put them beside Door against Clothes Horse. He always grumbles and says there's no room but there's plenty if he stands up really straight. I can fold up flat too but not quite as flat because of my muscles, from being alive. Door's made of shiny magic metal, he goes beep beep after nine when I'm meant to be switched off in Wardrobe.
God's yellow face isn't coming in today, Ma says he's having trouble squeezing through the snow.
"What snow?"
"See," she says, pointing up.
There's a little bit of light at Skylight's top,...
Indie Booksellers’ Choice Awards
2011
When I finished this brilliant novel, besides being as locked into its story and world as Jack and Ma were in Room, I had no idea how I would review it. I was convinced there was nothing I could say about it without the entire review being one big spoiler. For me, what made Room so great was that I never knew from page to page what would happen next. Finding out what happens next made it one of the best thrillers I have ever read. I want every reader to experience that... By filtering [Room's] themes through the eyes and mind of a child, Donoghue lays on the patina of a fairy tale. She also illustrates the power of mothering and the heroism of ordinary people. These are just some of the ways we triumph over a world full of terrors...continued
Full Review
(488 words)
(Reviewed by Judy Krueger).
Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot's Wife and A Change in Altitude
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. Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry
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. Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and By Nightfall
Room is that rarest of entities, an entirely original work of art. I mean it as the highest possible praise when I tell you that I can't compare it to any other book. Suffice to say that it's potent, darkly beautiful, and revelatory.
Emma Donoghue is an award-winning Irish writer who lives in Canada. She has published seven novels, three collections of short stories, three works of non-fiction and various productions for stage, radio and screen.
In her own words: "Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, I am the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic, Henry James Professor at New York University). I attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one eye-opening year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 I earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin (unfortunately, without learning to actually speak French). I moved to England, and in 1997 ...
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