Room

I got sucked in by a book this weekend – Room by Emma Donoghue.

I fell victim to the NPR story last week on building buzz on books as a way to sell them.  The story used this book as an example. I was absolutely intrigued by the synopsis – not sure what that says about me…

Amazon abstract:

In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son.

I don’t want to give anything away so I won’t say too much about the story but I really enjoyed reading this book and couldn’t stop.  I started it on Friday morning and finished on Saturday afternoon.

The story is written in the voice of Jack (the 5-year-old) throughout the entire book, which is very intriguing and opened up a part of my brain that experiences new things – meaning it was easy to feel like a kid and go through his ordeals from that perspective.  It me a bit of a character in Mark Haddon’s  book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I loved and which is also written from the perspective of a child (a 15-year-old with Asperger’s Syndrome).

I can tell you that the abstract leads you to believe that this might be a sensational story of triumph over cruel circumstances and tells you the nasty details of the imprisonment, but it’s not that way.  The story is surprising in where it goes and how it gets there.

This book was short-listed for the Man-Booker Prize this year and is “set to be one of the big literary hits of the year.”