From the book coverTo five-year-old Jack, room is the world...
It's where he was born. It's where he and Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. There are endless wonders that let loose Jack's imagination - the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells; the imaginary world projected through the TV; the coziness of Wardrobe beneath Ma's clothes, where she tucks him in safely at night, in case Old Nick comes.
Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it's the prison where she's been held since she was nineteen - for seven long years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in that eleven-eleven-foot space. But Jack's curiosity is building alongside Ma's own desperation, and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely...
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Emma Donoghue's Room made the 2011 Orange Prize Short List.
The Orange Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote English works of fiction by women around the world.
It didn't take much to get me into Room. Its similarities with the high-profile Jaycee Lee Duguard case can't be ignored. When I initially read the book cover, I was a bit concerned about the story being told from the prospective of a five-year-old, but I think the technique is a stroke of genius on the part of Emma Donaghue. By using Jack to tell the story, the readers get to skip over the boring details and she's also able to inject a little bit of levity to a very sad story.
Jack, the five-year-old narrator, is no ordinary five-year-old. He's in turns extremely smart and naive about the world outside of his room and socially an infant. His intelligence is the type the comes from having a mother who's spent five years completely devoted to nurturing his body and mind as much as possible in a 11-feet square soundproof garden shed, with a sunroof being their only source of natural light.
The book is divided into five chapters, the first two document Jack and his Ma's time in their backyard dungeon, the third documents their escape and the last two their time adjusting to the outside world. I found the first two chapters really engaging, the third chapter was the typical action sequence climax and the last two chapters were a bit of a let down with the stereotypical characters one would expect in such a story.
5
The Orange Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote English works of fiction by women around the world.
It didn't take much to get me into Room. Its similarities with the high-profile Jaycee Lee Duguard case can't be ignored. When I initially read the book cover, I was a bit concerned about the story being told from the prospective of a five-year-old, but I think the technique is a stroke of genius on the part of Emma Donaghue. By using Jack to tell the story, the readers get to skip over the boring details and she's also able to inject a little bit of levity to a very sad story.
Jack, the five-year-old narrator, is no ordinary five-year-old. He's in turns extremely smart and naive about the world outside of his room and socially an infant. His intelligence is the type the comes from having a mother who's spent five years completely devoted to nurturing his body and mind as much as possible in a 11-feet square soundproof garden shed, with a sunroof being their only source of natural light.
The book is divided into five chapters, the first two document Jack and his Ma's time in their backyard dungeon, the third documents their escape and the last two their time adjusting to the outside world. I found the first two chapters really engaging, the third chapter was the typical action sequence climax and the last two chapters were a bit of a let down with the stereotypical characters one would expect in such a story.
5
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