Book Review: "Room" by Emma Donoghue

Previously posted on Goodreads!¹

"The wide of the walls is the same as wide as the wide of Floor!"

I don't do this regularly, but I saw the movie first :O so I knew I was going to read this from Jack's perspective. THAT is what makes the book so interesting, but I guess if I hadn't seen the movie before I would've been lost in some parts. That's something I didn't like, to be honest. But now, let's separate the book from the movie:

Jack is a little boy that, despite his situation, is a very happy boy that has had a great childhood thanks to his Ma (and from my point of view, from TV, his only "window" to the world). His entire world is Room, and the things there are persons for him, they're their friends. 

For a moment I thought his vocabulary was inaccurate for a boy his age, but later on, the author explains where he's learned all of this since Ma's games weren't just about having fun. So the author definitely sounds like a child, and not because of the misspelling of verbs, but because you can read a five-year-old boy who has infinite questions, who takes everything literally, who has tantrums, and that even when this boy is outside Room, he still lives in a world of his own (and Ma's). 

You can feel Ma's anger through Jack, her desperation, her hopelessness, even when Jack can't express it with words. He knows how to interpret her perfectly, and the thing that shocked me the most while reading was precisely that, that Jack in some points doesn't act like a son but a parent. Jack, aside from being Ma's hero, is her anchor, her reason to survive in Room but not in Outside. Jack's is reborn and Ma doesn't, at first. She thought everything would be alright but she is still a kid. She spent an eternity in Room and she remembers the world in a very different way… and this world is so big and so terrifying that she doesn't know what to do anymore. She collapses while Jack is learning about everything so fast that he even says that he's seen enough of this world and that now he's tired. 

And you get tired too; you start feeling like Jack because everything is overwhelming. Everything changed so fast that I even felt a bit dizzy. 

This book is so well written that maybe you ask “why 4 stars (well it’s more like a 4.5) instead of 5?” well, because of its triggers. It’s a difficult book to read if you’ve been in a situation like this (I’m not saying I have), but you can see depression, suicide attempts, rape, lots of nightmares some topics that can be difficult for some readers.

For a moment I thought that it would’ve been awesome to read from Ma’s point of view but in the end I was more like “nope, that’s enough.”

EMMA DONOGHUE 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 honors BA in English and French from University College Dublin and in 1997 a Ph.D. (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.

¹This review was written and originally posted on my Goodreads profile in 2016. It might now present minor changes in structure or corrections, but has not changed its intention.