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5 Stars for Emma Donoghue’s ‘Room’

5 Stars for Emma Donoghue’s ‘Room’Room by Emma Donoghue
Also by this author: The Wonder, Akin
five-stars
Published by HarperCollins Publishers on September 15th 2015
Genres: Contemporary Fiction
Pages: 432
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Synopsis from Goodreads: Now a Major Motion Picture starring Brie Larson and William H. Macy#1 International BestsellerWinner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction PrizeWinner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada and Caribbean region)Winner of the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year.

To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. It’s where he was born. It’s where he and Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. There are endless wonders that let loose Jack’s imagination-the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells; the coziness of Wardrobe beneath Ma’s clothes, where she tucks him in safely at night, in case Old Nick comes.
Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it’s the prison where she’s been held since she was nineteen-for seven long years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in that eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But Jack’s curiosity is building alongside her own desperation, and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely . . .
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.

 

My review:  

I have to confess I had never heard of Emma Donoghue prior to the Oscar buzz that surrounded the film ‘Room’ earlier this year.  Because I have a rule that I never watch a movie that is based on a book until I have actually read the book, I immediately purchased a copy of ‘Room’ and settled in to find out why this story was generating so much interest.

There are some books that are out of sight, out of mind as soon as you finish reading the last page, and then there are others that crawl into your brain and won’t let go. ‘Room’ is most definitely the latter of the two.  I finished reading it a week ago and literally cannot stop thinking about it.  It’s just that mind blowing.

‘Room’ is a 12’x12’ shed where ‘Ma’ and her son, Jack, are living when the novel opens.  Ma was abducted when she was 19 years old and has been held captive in this room for seven years.  Jack, who is five years old (so yes, a child of rape), was born in this room and has never been outside of it.  This one room is literally his whole world.

What makes this story so unforgettable is the unique point of view from which it is told.  Instead of having Ma tell her story, which is what I would have expected, five-year old Jack is actually the narrator.  Because we are seeing the story unfold from Jack’s innocent perspective, rather than being plunged immediately into a horrific tale of kidnapping, imprisonment, and rape, instead we are presented with a view of everyday life in what Jack refers to as ‘Room’ and a beautiful story about a mother’s love for her child.  The first half of the novel paints a vivid picture of the world within ‘Room’ that Ma has painstakingly created for Jack.  The reader can see that Ma has clearly poured her heart and soul into shielding Jack from the reality of their imprisonment and into making his life as close to normal as she possibly can, given the circumstances.  And she has succeeded.  Jack truly believes that ‘Room’ is all there is and that anything else he sees on television is just make believe.  He has no idea that he and his mother are being held captive and that terrible things have happened to his mother since before he was born.

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About Emma Donoghue

emma donoghue

Emma is the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue. She attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 she earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin, and in 1997 a PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. Since the age of 23, Donoghue has earned her living as a full-time writer. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 she settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner and their son and daughter.