Room by Emma Donoghue

I read this a couple of months back and I quite enjoyed it. It is very well-loved in the book community so I was curious about it. I was not disappointed! 

This book is about a boy of five, Jack, whose world is in one room. He was born in Room, he grew up in Room. It's where he eats, sleeps, play, watches TV... 

Jack has a very limited view of the world. To him, trees and dogs and the sky, the wind and anything that is outside Room is unreachable. He calls them planets. The planet where trees are and so on. There is Skylight though, where Jack and Mama practice their screaming (trying to get people to hear them, but the room is so thick with sound proof walls, there's no way anyone can hear).

The book starts when it is his fifth birthday and his mama baked him a cake. We learn afterwards that there is a door in Room that opens only from the outside and you can hear someone punching in a code. Old Nick. The man who has them trapped in Room. He is not allowed to see Jack, so every night, Jack is put to sleep in Wardrobe, ever since he born. Old Nick returns most nights of the week but never stays till the morning. Sometimes when Jack hears him leave after he's been in bed with Mama, he crawls in under the sheets with her. Moreover, Mama is now fed up, she is ready to bust out of this place. She has made plans where Jack is to pretend he has a bad fever and dies the next day, so that Old Nick is forced to carry him out of Room and bury him. Mama told him to run once he's put into the back of the truck. She tells him to find the first policeman and tell them everything. 

Donoghue is able to picture the world from a five year old who has no conception of the world. A world of entrapment and acceptance. She tells us that sometimes as ignorant as we are, we are comfortable in that ignorance, happy almost, but we never know just who we might be hurting with our stubbornness and our unwilling to unlearn all that we have learnt. Mama tries to tell Jack that everything on TV is real, all the animals, other people even. He refuses to believe this. Only himself, Mama and Old Nick are real. Mama sometimes is gone, as Jack puts it. She falls into static state where she doesn't get out of bed the whole day. She obviously has fallen into depression after being kidnapped at nineteen and living in this box for seven years. The only thing holding her back from taking her life is her son, Jack. She has an unbreakable bond with him. At five, she still breastfed him, as if in fear this bond will be terminated. 

All in all, Room was very interesting to read and quite gripping. I am looking forward to reading Donoghue's other works!