Heartbreak, Feel-Good, Repeat – ROOM by Emma Donoghue

ROOM
by Emma Donoghue

Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: September 13, 2010

From Goodreads:

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.

Man, did this book surprise me! The premise interested me WAY back, when it first came out, I just didn’t get around to reading it until recently. And when I say read, I mean listen to, through my library’s Overdrive service.

This book is packed with equal parts heartbreak and feel-good moments. It starts out breaking your heart, then gives you a feel-good moment to smile about.

Jack’s mother, known as ‘Ma’, has raised Jack to believe there isn’t anything outside of Room. So as you’re reading about Jack telling us all about his life, and his world, your heart breaks with how fervently he believes it’s the whole world with the naivety that can only exist inside of a trusting child. But then you also read about how much he loves his life because of the effort his mother put into giving him a good life inside of a prison, and the heart begins to stitch back together.

Rinse and repeat.

The characters of Jack and ‘Ma’ are two of the most authentic characters I’ve ever read. They were so real, and I felt so connected to them, that I felt like I was reading about something that happened to some people I know. For days, I walked around with Jack’s voice in my head. Wondering what he’d think about this or that.

My on snafu, and the only things that kept this book from being a full five-star rating, was plot-related. It moved forward too early for my liking. I wasn’t ready yet. I needed to spend more time with the first half. As a consequence, the second half felt too long.

It was a small snafu. 

Overall, I absolutely loved this book, and I would recommend it to anyone. I’d recommend it to you. Yes you, with the bottle of water. And you, reading this on your phone. And you, with the tin foil on your head, hiding from aliens. Read it.

Fun fact about this post: This fulfills my POPSUGAR Reading Challenge prompt of ‘A book about feminism.’