Though it took me a couple of chapters to get into this latest by Emma Donoghue, staying with it paid off. It’s sometime after the Crimean War and a British nurse, Lib Wright, is sent to a remote village in Ireland. Lib was trained in the “new” nursing methods by Florence Nightingale and she has been hired by a committee of locals to help verify (or disprove) that a miracle is taking place. A young eleven-year-old girl, Anna O’Donnell, stopped eating four months before and […]
A powerful, moving Cannonball book
I’ve mentioned before that my students have been in the midst of book-and-movie review presentations. The number one choice this year was The Martian, especially with my male engineering students. The number two choice was Room. All of my students who reviewed it gave it a rave, and I finally decided to bump it up my TBR. It was a strong, poignant book that pulled me in and never let me go. SPOILERS LURK AHEAD. Although, I actually felt that not having many surprises helped […]
“Everyone’s got a different story.”
I’ll start by saying I totally get the appeal of Room. The use of the unreliable narrator is particularly effective, creating a palpable dramatic irony and enhancing the reader’s apprehension by forcing us to fill in for ourselves all of the horrific details that our five-year-old narrator Jack does not, and cannot, understand about Room. I’m really digging deep into what I remember from high school English lit classes, but I digress. The point is that the exaggerated naivete of the narrator ratchets up tension […]
This Kid is Going to be Soooooo Messed Up
As will soon become somewhat of a running theme for my reviews, I’m finally reading a book that came out quite a while ago. I’ve had a very backed-up book queue, alright? Room, by Emma Donoghue, is about a boy who lives with his mother in a small shed. “Ma” was abducted as a teenager and has spent the last seven years in captivity. They story is told through the eyes of Jack, a result of the multiple rapes (the reader is thankfully not subjected […]
Well, that was good
I head about Room after Brie Larson got some acting nominations for her portrayal of Ma in the 2015 movie of the same name. My husband, however, isn’t a fan of movies that are depressing for the sake of being depressing so I opted to read the book and seek the movie out when it inevitably shows up on Netflix or Amazon Prime. I couldn’t put it down. Literally. Room is told from the perspective of five-year-old Jack; Jack lives in a room with his […]
Goodnight, Room.
I think this is one of those times where if you mistake the subject of a story for its purpose, you might come away disliking it. Also, your patience with highly unreliable and stylistically experimental narrators may have a lot do with it as well. Spoilers for the first third or so of the book to follow, because what I have to say can’t be said without spoiling stuff (for what it’s worth, I had this bit spoiled for me as well and it didn’t […]