L'Habitació (2010)

I thought at first that I wouldn't be able to finish this book. It was so hard to get through the first half because I kept thinking of the real people that this has happened to. It was a good thing for me that the reader was getting the story from the perspective of a 5 year old who doesn't understand the enormity of his horrible situation. I've read the reviews of others who wanted the mother's viewpoint but that would have been too heartbreaking for me.

It was a little tiresome having each and every object in the room treated almost as a person with a proper name, but small children do have interesting quirks sometimes. He substitutes these for other people which wouldn't be unusual, I don't think. I also found a few of Jack's observations to be much too mature and insightful for his age. For example, he observed that people in the outside have too little time, seemingly because it is stretched too thin over all the space. Hardly the thoughts of a 5 year old.

The second half of the book was such a relief, but it didn't make sense to me when Ma tried to commit suicide. She seems relatively well-adapted except for her anger at people who question her handling of her life while in captivity. I thought the lead-up to that should have shown her as being much more freaked out.

Overall I thought this novel was pretty amazing because it takes such a depressing and difficult subject and turns a horrible situation into one with tremendous hope without being unrealistic or too mushy. ( )

I, like many other people, didn't want to read this book because I thought "how can a book set in one room in a child's head be good". Well, surprise - I loved it. You get used the narrative voice almost right away and it is the thing, in the end, that just tugs at your heart strings. I cried, numerous times, not for the obvious reasons but for the poignancy of lost childhood memories. ( )

I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while now. I know when it was published there was a huge amount of buzz about it. And then the film adaptation came out, which I saw and thought was really good. But I never managed to get to the book until now, when my book club picked it as this month’s read.

It is a really interesting read. You’d think a story all about kidnapping and sexual slavery would be hugely depressing and harrowing, but by using Jack’s point of view Donoghue manages to make the story a more innocent one. The reader can see what is really going on, but Jack doesn’t know, so the reader is sheltered, in a way, from the true horrors of Ma’s experiences. If she had been our narrator this would have been such a tough book I don’t know if I would ever have read it. Jack has never known any world but Room, and he isn’t the focus of Old Nick’s violence, so while he does suffer it isn’t as visceral as it could have been. He creates a remove for the reader, which allows you to enjoy the book more. Or at least I think so.

That isn’t to say that this is an easy read, or that it glosses over the horror that is Ma’s kidnapping. It is just that Jack doesn’t understand and as the reader sees the world through his eyes it is a very different experience than it could have been.

(spoiler paragraph removed here, you can read it on my blog : http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/2017/02/room/ )

It is really worth a read. ( )

This book has been on my “to-read” list for quite a while, and as the list of awards and accolades grew, I decided I really needed to pick it up.

Jack is an intelligent and perceptive five-year-old boy being raised by a single mother. Nothing extraordinary about that — except for the fact that they are imprisoned in a garden shed which they call “Room.” Jack and his mother live as normally as possible within the confines of Room, giving names to inanimate objects like Bed and Rug, exercising by running laps around Room, making crafts like an eggshell snake, cleaning and cooking. Occasionally there are nighttime visits from “Old Nick,” who brings them supplies and “makes the bed creak.” As time progresses, Jack’s mother begins to reveal to him the existence of a world outside Room — concepts which are understandably difficult for him to understand. And soon, she is telling him about her plan to break out of Room — to go Outside. But that is only the beginning of the challenges for Jack.

The book is narrated by a young boy, which is a perspective not often employed in fiction. I also appreciated the author’s portrayal the repercussions of confinement and freedom on the development of the young boy and his mother, as well as the reaction of the media to the case. Although marketed as a novel for adults, I can definitely see appeal for the young adult reader, especially those who enjoyed books like Elizabeth Scott’s “Living Dead Girl” and other dramatic crime fiction. It was a quick read for me, and though I enjoyed the book, it won’t be one that I return to again. ( )

I was skeptical about this book, only because so many "serious" novelists seem to delight in gut-wrenching endings, and this one seemed ripe for such an ending. After I was assured by a friend that I wouldn't be crying at the end, though she told me nothing else about it, I gave it a try. There were moments when it seemed to drag a bit for my taste, but some of those moments, when they were locked together in the room, may have been intended to have that effect, to bring us into the monotony of their confined lives. Even the parts that were a little slow were never terribly so, though, and the story would move on and was still enjoyable. I read this book in one day in two sittings, so the slow parts weren't THAT slow. It's a dreadful premise that is made tolerable because of the voice of the five-year-old narrator. He and Ma are beautifully complex and developed, and I think the author did a wonderful job of imagining the effects of their imprisonment and subsequent freedom on both of them. The premise could just as well have been a thriller, but this one is a character novel, not a thriller, and much more satisfying for it. ( )