Review: Room by Emma Donoghue
From Goodreads: To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it’s where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. 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 is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. …more To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it’s where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. 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 is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it’s not enough…not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son’s bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.
Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.
Emma Donoghue has created such a fascinating and provocative story inside the pages of her latest book Room that I am loathe to try to review it. Seeing everything from Jack’s eyes, I am almost certain I have never truly fallen in love with character until now. Jack is brave and strong and he is scared and this is the most amazing chance for any reader to get lost in rediscovering the world from the eyes of a child.
I found myself angry with Jack’s Ma in the last third of the book. All he has ever known is her and Room and she becomes increasingly selfish through-out the novel. However I can’t say that I would do anything differently if I was in her shoes. So the fact that I was angry with her made me angry at myself and I began to think about the ways I interact with my own children. Am I setting them up for some kind of mental fall out later in life? Those impossible questions that can’t be answered until you are slapped with the therapy bills I suppose.
Jack is a fantastic narrator, growing up in Room with little to do but read and count he is fantastically ahead with his mental capability for learning. I love his voice, and the way he explains everything in his world to his reader. I love that Dora is his friend inside of Room just like she is the friend of so many children outside of Room.
At 8:30 I press the button on TV and try between the three. I find Dora the Explorer, yippee. Ma moves Bunny around and real slow to better the picture with his ears and head. One day when I was four TV died and I cried, but in the night Old Nick brung a magic converter box to make TV back to life. The other channels after the three are totally fuzzy so we don’t watch them because of hurting our eyes, only if there’s music we put Blanket over and just listen through the gray of her and shake our booties.
Today I put my fingers on Dora’s head for a hug and tell her about my superpowers now I’m five, she smiles. She has the most huge hair that’s really like a brown helmet with pointy bits cutted out, it’s as big as the rest of her. I sit back on Bed in Ma’s lap to watch, I wriggle till I’m not on her pointy bones. She doesn’t have many soft bits but they’re super soft.
So there you can get a great sense of Jack and his narration skills from that quote from early on in the book. As the story progresses and we see the ‘games’ that Ma and Jack play are really Ma trying to get the neighbors to notice them and escape the book becomes a bit harder to read. I have shed many a tear during the reading of Room and it is not a book that I am going to forget any time soon.
Thank you Emma Donoghue and Jack for giving me such an amazing gift of a book that will stay with me as time progresses and that made me feel so much.
This story is beautiful and haunting and many other adjectives that I could continue piling onto this sentence. Pick up a copy and read I promise you will not be disappointed.
Review: Hearts at Stake (My Love Lies Bleeding) The Drake Chronicles by Alyxandra Harvey
Alyxandra Harvey has made quite a fan out of me with her first book in The Drake Chronicles. A big thanks to Amy for the recommendation. The two main characters Lucy (Lucky) and Solange are as different as night and day but somehow their best friendship makes total sense. Solange is a vampire princess born to a prestigious family that dates back to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Solange doesn’t really want to turn at her sixteenth birthday, nor does she want the crown that comes along with her transformation. Evil hordes of pretender queens to the throne and her minions try to thwart Solange in every effort she makes even though she has a total lack of interest in the crown. Just her being alive is enough to send the vampires into a frenzy.
Lucy has hippy parents and a love for ice cream not made with tofu. She is sassy and brilliant and like Solange a very well thought out character you immediately love. Even with all her bravado Lucy is not afraid to say when she is scared. Being human around a bunch of vampires at times can be a scary experience. Lucy has a dialogue that had me laughing out loud through out the book and her love interest was a great addition to the chaos surrounded her and her friends lives at that moment.
This book has loads of amazing characters. Solange’s family unit, Lucy, even the bad guys have style. Hearts at Stake is a silly fun read. Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
But not right now, right now I could indulge in a moment of triumph. But only a moment.
Because it was just one of those days.
This is better than some old fat guy. Now gimme.
If you love fun vampire fiction, then please give this book a chance! I cannot wait for the next in the series.
Review: Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingston
I am a bit late with reading this one. I noticed at the start of last year, if Harper Teen puts it out I should read it. I was dusting my shelves and most of the books I had bought came from Harper Teen. When it came to reading Wondrous Strange I just never got around to picking it up. I was still on a high from reading another Faerie series from Harper Teen, The Immortal Realm by Frewin Jones, and this book had gotten so much hype I just thought, “huh, no way I want to read that and be disappointed”.
We follow Kelley as she is living in the rough city of New York trying to find her way onto Broadway. She works at a small theater called the Avalon as hired help and the understudy when fortune would have it the lady playing Titania “went snap”. Kelley now faced with being thrown into the spotlight also faces a few twists and turns a coming of age and needing to look deep inside herself to save the people she truly loves. Along the way she meets Sonny and they of course fall in love, will the Faerie’s allow one of their prized Janus Guards to consort with a mere mortal?
This book has it all, a kelpie who turns into a war horse, and evil autumn queen scorned by the lack of love. Beautiful and cold faerie kings and queens, changeling children, samhain, magic. The list could go on and on. I am so glad I finally purchased this as an ebook. On my way to buy the next in the series. I have to know what happens next! If you like Black, Marr, Werlin, or Simner then you will love Wondrous Strange.
