Book #104: Room: A novel

Title: Room: A Novel
Author: Emma Donoghue

I was incredibly confused by the first few chapters of Room. I hadn't heard anything about the novel, and since I listened to it on my iPod I couldn't flip ahead or read the book jacket, and suddenly I was thrust into a world where there was a child narrator (actually read by a child or by someone who convincingly imitated one) living in a place where something was not exactly right.

That something turns out to be the fact that the small boy, Jack, and his mother are kept locked up in a 10'x10' shed in the back yard. When Jack turns five, he and his mother start making a plan to escape from the room, the only home Jack has ever known. The ramifications of their escape plan prove to be far more challenging than either one had anticipated. I can't say more without giving too much away.

Room is a fascinating book, but also annoying in its own way. I loved the way that Donoghue seemed to get into the mind of her five-year-old protagonist, but there were also things that didn't add up-- the fact that Jack was a proficient reader, for example, but had no sense of using articles in spoken language. I'm not used to listening to audiobooks with more than one narrator (with few exceptions) and as far as I could tell, there were at least four voices narrating Room, which proved problematic when the psychopathic lunatic who locked Jack's mother up and regularly raped her was voiced by the same person who read the part of the kindly psychiatrist. The woman who read the part of Jack's mom sounded much older and calmer than I imagine a 26-year-old who had been locked up for seven years would sound and feel. I think the book would have been better if it had been read by a single actor.

I'd definitely recommend Room. It made me cry, and the "ripped from the headlines" (the book seems to roughly parallel the Jaycee Duggard story) approach made it feel timely. But more than that, I appreciated Donoghue's work at tackling the story through the eyes of a five-year-old boy, seeing the world beyond his Room for the very first time.