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Original Essays | September 17, 2013
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Roomby Emma Donoghue
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Emma Donoghue mines current headlines for her harrowing account of a young women held captive in a room for years. Forced to bear a child by her captor, "Ma" becomes increasingly desperate to escape her one-room hell. On the other hand, Jack, her 5-year-old son, loves "Room" — it is his entire world. Narrated by Jack, this terrifying story is so worth the angst you will experience reading it. Heartbreaking, hopeful, gripping, and flat-out fantastic, Room will stay with you long after you put it down. Review-A-Day"Reading Room is an experience that you'll never forget. It's difficult to imagine a more poignant portrait of two lives — all splashed with primary colors but deeply shadowed by pain and anguish. Your feelings are stretched so thin that at points, you're not sure if you can keep reading through to the end. Yet, you're compelled to, driven by the hope for survival and redemption, and, ultimately, you arrive, profoundly affected." Heidi Mager, Powells.com (Read the entire Powells.com review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: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. Review:"At the start of Donoghue's powerful new novel, narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a 19-year-old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard. The sociopath, whom Jack has dubbed Old Nick, visits at night, grudgingly doling out food and supplies. Seen entirely through Jack's eyes and childlike perceptions, the developments in this novel — there are enough plot twists to provide a dramatic arc of breathtaking suspense — are astonishing. Ma, as Jack calls her, proves to be resilient and resourceful, creating exercise games, makeshift toys, and reading and math lessons to fill their days. And while Donoghue (Slammerkin) brilliantly portrays the psyche of a child raised in captivity, the story's intensity cranks up dramatically when, halfway through the novel and after a nail-biting escape attempt, Jack is introduced to the outside world. While there have been several true-life stories of women and children held captive, little has been written about the pain of re-entry, and Donoghue's bravado in investigating that potentially terrifying transformation grants the novel a frightening resonance that will keep readers rapt. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright PWyxz LLC)
Review:"Talented, versatile Donoghue relates a searing tale of survival and recovery, in the voice of a five-year-old boy....Wrenching, as befits the grim subject matter, but also tender, touching and at times unexpectedly funny." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review:"one of the most affecting and subtly profound novels of the year.... You need to enter this small, harrowing place prepared only to have your own world expanded." Washington Post
Review:"An emotionally draining read, yet at the same time impossible to put down, it has all the makings of a modern classic. Donoghue's inventive storytelling is flawless and absorbing" Boston Globe
Review:"[Room] is a triumph, a celebration of the lengths we go to for our loved ones, and the comfort in the skewed world that relationships create." Oregonian
Synopsis: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.
VideoAbout the AuthorBorn in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is a writer of contemporary and historical fiction whose novels include the bestselling Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter, Landing, Life Mask, Hood, and Stirfry. Her story collections are The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, Kissing the Witch, and Touchy Subjects. She also writes literary history, and plays for stage and radio. She lives in London, Ontario, with her partner and their two small children.
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