Room
A Novel
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4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The award-winning bestseller that became one of the most talked about and memorable novels of the decade, Room is "utterly gripping...a heart-stopping novel" (San Francisco Chronicle). Held captive for years in a small shed, a woman and her precocious young son finally gain their freedom, and the boy experiences the outside world for the first time.
To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. 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's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.
Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating — a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child.
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 inspired a powerful 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
Page turner!
This has become my new favorite book, and Emma Donoghue my new favorite author. Room takes you into another world, and you never quite escape. The characters stay with you, even after you're finished reading. Room makes you look at and appreciate the things around you in a whole new way.
Must Read
It has everything a good book needs. It is really strange in the way that it is told from a child’s perspective, but still really awesome.
Creatively Painful
Emma’s work is the perfect blend of a heart wrenching story with commentary on the media’s predatory gaze and hunger for optimism in miserable situations that should never happen to anyone. She has truly mastered the limited perspective of a child while keeping their limitless imagination that remains within and outside of Room contrasting Ma’s heartbreaking struggle to keep herself in tact while raising a child who innocently and unknowingly dismisses and degrades her life she previously had and desperately tries to cling to even after 6 years of captivity. Amazing work.