Room

Paperback, 321 pages

English language

Published Sept. 2, 2015 by Back Bay Books.

ISBN:
978-0-316-39134-4
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
911210550

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(3 reviews)

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, Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where Jack 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 cre- ated a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But Jack's curiosity is building alongside Ma's own desperation—and 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.

44 editions

Uncomfortable read

Five-year-old Jack and Ma, live happily together in Room, or so Jack thinks.

I hesitate to say I like this book, but I found it believable as a story told from the perspective of a child. I’m not sure that I could have stomached this written from Ma’s POV. The POV chosen allows the horrors visited upon Ma and Jack to unfurl obliquely throughout. Though Jack is the protagonist, it was Ma who occupied my thoughts. I can’t help but think about all the real Ma’s out there. This, for me, is true horror. The stuff that can and does happen, not the things that go bump in the night.

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