Room, by Emma Donohue: A Review
This was selling quite well on its own and I wanted to know why.
I read it, was amazed by it, and I recommend it.
We join a girl who had been kidnapped seven years prior to where the action picks up. For seven years, she has been kept isolated in a small room. Two years into her captivity, she gives birth to a boy.
The book is in his words for the most part. He is five and has never seen the outside, never seen anything but the room. The room is his world.
His mother raises him alone, teaches him, protects him from their captor, and together they make their small world into a home filled with love though it is assaulted regularly by fear.
Ms Donohue had to have been struck by a lightning bolt of genius to so thoroughly immerse herself in the mind of a five-year-old boy living under these particularly odd circumstances. She gives him voice. No, wait, he gives her voice. Anyway, she brings to the page the vibrancy and exquisite observations, beliefs and notions of a little boy, in an eloquent dialogue perforated by soliloquy and seasoned with edge-of-the-seat action.
I will not tell you more, except that if you do not read it, you will never know what a wonderful book you are missing. I hope she writes a sequel to this.
Reviewed by Victoria
Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment