6 of 52 in my 2011 book blogging challenge.
Extraordinary. That’s the word that comes to mind for Emma Donoghue’s Room.
I’ve had this on my wish list for a few months now. I kept reading great reviews, and I kept thinking I would get to it sooner or later. I wasn’t quite sure I really wanted to read it, though. A book told from the point of view of a five-year-old? Could that really be good?
Thanks to Stephanie, who suggested Room for our book club, I’ve read it now, and I have to answer “Yes!” It’s not just good; it’s great. I was completely absorbed.
Room is about a woman who was kidnapped at the age of 19 and held captive in a back yard shed that has been reinforced so many different ways there is no hope of escape. She gives birth to a little boy in this 11 x 11 space, and until he is five he knows no other world but this room.
From that description, it might sound like a book about depravity and deprivation, but I see it more as a book about the enormous capacity of the human spirit to prevail even in the worst circumstances.
The mother in this story creates a life for her son in their prison that is as normal and happy a life as it is possible to imagine when life consists of two people and the world is 11 x 11. They keep up with the days of the week and the months of the year. They have routines of singing and exercise and laundry and vocabulary development exercises. They make toys out of the cardboard cylinders from toilet paper rolls. The boy does not know he is deprived.
Room is the story of captivity, and it is the story of escape. It’s the story of what “outside” looks like to a child who never knew “outside” was real or even possible.
Room is extraordinary. I give it five out of five stars all the way around.
Room is a work of fiction, but it was perhaps inspired by true stories of women who have been held captive in similar fashions. Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped in 1991 at the age of 11, was found and reunited with her family in 2009 after 18 years in captivity. She’d born two children by her captor. The year before, an Australian woman was discovered to have been held captive by her own father for two decades. She had multiple children.
It’s a shocking, horrible thing to even contemplate. I wasn’t sure I wanted to contemplate it, and that’s why I put off reading this book for several months.
I’m not sure how you write an uplifting book about such a nightmare of a subject and still manage to write a book of serious literary value, but Donoghue has done it with Room. This is the brilliance of the five-year-old narrator. Jack’s mother protects him from the full knowledge of what is happening. She protects him from having to understand what has happened when she has been raped and beaten and psychologically abused. The reader understands what has happened, but the reader gets the story through the filter of an essentially happy child.
This makes for a remarkable read. Go read it now. You’ll treasure the time you spend with Room.
