Room reviewed by Renée Levine

Room, by Emma Donoghue

I am Jack. Today I am five. Me and Ma live in Room, that’s all there is.

“Jack and Ma live in a locked room that measures eleven foot by eleven. When he turns five, he starts to ask questions, and his mother reveals to him that there is a world outside. Told entirely in Jack’s voice, ROOM is no horror story or tearjerker, but a celebration of resilience and the love between parent and child.”


This is a quote from the author and makes it difficult to continue because it really tells it all. The story of the boy who spends the first five years of his life in an eleven by eleven foot sized room built by the man who sexually abused and had kidnapped the young mother and installed her in this prison seven years ago, is based on a true story of abuse in the Fritzl family and so acknowledged by Donoghue.
I loved the book; read it as a page turner, was won over by the emotionally charged existence of this child and his mother and felt my heart wrenched as the tale unfolded. There are many readers who are bored, who have read about such cases in the press or heard about them on the telly, refuse to be wrenched around by a little kid and manipulated to emote over this kind of a scenario, so common in our time. However, I felt the power of the writing, I was touched by the innocence and the intelligence of the child and was carried away by the unfolding of the tale. I was mesmerized by my comprehending, actually taking in that this little boy really only knew what his mother told him; he had no other world ever at his disposal until, and I will not reveal the second part of the plot, but he does get out and he does learn to see another world beyond the eleven feet square he had always known. How he learns to make sense of that new setting, that is equally beautifully told and actually taught me about how we perceive as opposed to what there actually is.
Enjoy it. I did.