Booking It - "Room"

Warning: don’t start reading this book if you have homework to do, because you won’t get anything done until you finish. Room, the latest book by Irish-born Canadian author Emma Donoghue, is an intense, fast moving story about a five-year-old boy named Jack and his relationship with his mother.

To Jack, it appears as if he has a normal life, but it is far from ordinary — he lives in a twelve-by-twelve-foot shed with his mother, who is kept as a sex slave by Old Nick (Jack came up with this name because Old Nick reminds him of Old Saint Nick, since he is an old man who sneaks in at night). Jack’s mother, Ma, has done her very best to raise Jack in such a constrained environment — he loves to read, play games and watch Dora the Explorer on TV — yet when Old Nick loses his job, it becomes clear to Ma that their safety is more compromised than usual. Ma devises a risky escape plan that relies entirely on Jack, who has just learned that there is a world beyond the four walls that confine him.

Room would be interesting if told from a more traditional point of view, but having Jack’s innocent perspective and language makes it all the more riveting. Imagine having grown up believing that all you see on TV — children, the ocean, grass — was fake, that you, your mother and a strange man were the only real people and that the whole world was your room. Donoghue does an excellent job of illustrating Jack’s world in his believable voice without taking it over the top. Reading Room is like being in the head of a five-year-old — the thoughts, world choices and perspective give the reader a very strong sense of how Jack is seeing the world for the very first time.

The book is broken up into five different parts that begin describing their room — Jack and Ma’s everyday lives, how they pass the time — and then continues as Ma tries to teach Jack about the world in preparation for their escape. She tells Jack about her family and what it is like going to the beach, which makes Jack angry because he doesn’t want her to tell lies.

The rest of the book deals with Jack’s entry and Ma’s re-entry into the “real” world — which is scary to Jack compared to the womb-like quality of his room, which he wants desperately to go back to. The struggles that he faces learning about how to interact with people are astounding and make the reader wonder about how strange our society is. The reader also gets a heart-wrenching look at how difficult Ma’s re-entry into the world is through Jack’s sympathetic yet confused perspective.

Although stories like the one told in Room could make a reader worry about all the bad that there is in the world, Jack’s story makes its readers realize how powerful the ability to heal is. Rather than closing the book and feeling depressed, I found it cathartic and slightly uplifting — like a good cry — because it is a testament to human strength, survival and compassion. It is a work of fiction yet there is so much truth in Jack’s innocent way of looking at the world that I will continue to think about him and his struggle for weeks to come.