Room- Emma Donoghue

Synopsis (from Amazon)

It’s Jack’s birthday, and he’s excited about turning five.

Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real – only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there’s a world outside . . .

Told in Jack’s voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other.

Review

This is the first book in quite a long time that I can say I’ve devoured. I wanted to just keep reading it, I didn’t want to put it down. I had to force myself to put it down before going to sleep (I always read in bed before going to sleep). It went far too fast, I almost wish that the story had continued, but, although it could have continued and still been interesting, I think it did end in the right place. I thought Donoghue got Jack’s voice just about right, I could really believe that the story was being told by a 5 year old boy. Maybe he was a bit too bright, but some kids really are that bright- and I can understand with all that one-on-one time with his Mum, with nothing to do that he would learn pretty quickly. I found the actual topic really interesting, I don’t want to give it away but I found the later chapters more interesting than the first, although they were interesting in other ways. There were quite a few references to childhood today that may be better read by parents but not knowing them wouldn’t really matter, and most of them could well be familiar from your own childhoods.

Read it!

5/5