Room
A Novel
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4.3 • 917 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
#1 International Bestseller and award-winning Motion Picture.
To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world. It’s where he was born. It’s where he and Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. There are endless wonders that let loose Jack’s imagination: the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells; the imaginary world projected through the TV; the coziness of Wardrobe, where Ma tucks him in safely at night, in case Old Nick comes.
Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it’s the prison where she’s been held since she was nineteen—for seven long years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in that eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But Jack’s curiosity is building alongside Ma’s own desperation, and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely.
Told in the inventive, funny and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience—and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Five-year-old Jack knows nothing beyond the small garden shed he shares with his “Ma,” who is determined to cultivate her child’s imagination and intelligence even as she shields him from the terrifying truths of their imprisonment. Emma Donoghue's spot-on dialogue and inspired plot choices make Jack and Ma—and their heartbreakingly beautiful relationship—unforgettable. Told entirely from Jack's perspective, Room is a hugely original thriller that’s been made into a buzz-getting movie starring Brie Larson. Clear your schedule before you start this fast-paced, atmospheric, and supremely riveting book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Great read
What a wonderful book, to see the world for the first time and experience it through the eyes of a five year old. Sad but really good. Highly recommend.
ROOM
It will haunt you. Excellent book.
If you're looking for a simple, enjoyable read
If you're looking for an intense, suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat read, this book will probably only meet you halfway; In the beginning It definitely feels like this is the direction it is going in. But in reality Room is the heartbreaking tale of the strange, inseparable bond between a son and his mother, the only person he ever knew and loved. It's a simple story of how a world goes from so small to so large in a flash and the journey a small boy takes to grow accustomed to the sheer size of everything in existence. It's about learning that you really don't know what you're missing until you've experienced it for yourself. Many may find the ending unsatisfying and incomplete, but that is only because they were expecting an unrealistic chain of unfortunate events that would blossom into a crazy happy ending, when in reality the happy ending came about halfway through the book and evolved into something we can all relate to.