"Room is a difficult book to recommend because the plot sounds so much like a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller. But it’s not the plot that’s remarkable...it’s the voice. Five-year-old Jack may not understand that he and his mother are being brutally held captive or how their lives might change should they escape, but somehow his lack of understanding brings clarity and humanity to their situation. It’s his voice that allows the reader to connect with Ma, whereas hearing their story from her voice might have been so traumatic that it would be alienating.
When the media follows a story like this, they tend to report the sensational facts without any substantive follow-up. Donoghue asks the more difficult questions in a uniquely provocative and human way."
Publisher Back Bay Books
Publication Date 2011-05-18
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Rachel C.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780316098328
To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. . . . It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. 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's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer. Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating—a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child.
