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: True Blood: Dead Until Dark (Southern Vampire Series 1 Sookie Stackhouse) by Charlaine Harris
I recently started watching True Blood on HBO on demand and heard about Charlaine Harris and her Sookie Stackhouse novels by watching the show. I thought the show was kind of campy but it had all the elements of great vampire stories from the blood tears to the can’t come out in the day light phenomena. I then decided to pick up all the Southern Vampire Series books and I ordered a box set from Amazon, and got to reading. The first book in the series is Dead Until Dark. I realized almost immediately that the show on tv was very loosely based on the book. If I thought the show was camp, I was in no way prepared for the novel.
Let me start off by saying, the book read easy and flowed well. There is a mystery to be solved and it was written well. I don’t want to give too much away on that, but the mystery was the only reason I could even continue reading this book. Maybe the book is supposed to be like a vampire romance novel, the kind of stuff where Fabio is on the cover only with fangs. If that is it then yes the book was inside it’s genre. I have been reading vampire novels since I was a teen, this had all the old cliche’s and the familiarity of that was great. I was very disappointed in the main character, I thought she was a bit slutty to be constantly throwing this purity thing around. Also as the series continues, Sookie, who doesn’t seem to be the brightest light in Bon Temps has way too many suitors to keep up with. While there isn’t much trashy sex and the word cock isn’t mentioned once (thank the gods) I felt the book had this childish theme.
