Room - Emma Donoghue - ★★★.½

AUTHOR: Emma Donoghue

GENRE: Contemporary Thriller.

PUBLICATION DATE: August 20, 2010.

RATING: 3.5 stars.

My husband wanted to watch this movie and I wanted to complete the book before going for the movie. Hence taking a tiny break from my Anne of Green Gables series, I picked up Room with high hopes. Now that I'm done with it however, I'm left with very mixed emotions.

Room is the story of a five year old boy and his mother, who had been kidnapped by a perverted sadist seven years prior and locked up in a "Room". The boy is an unfortunate outcome of the nightly rapes, and yet, he becomes the beacon of hope and means of escape for his mother. Their lives in their locked Room and after their escape, their attempt to settle in the "Outside" forms the crux of the story.

The story of Room brought to mind the Fritzl case of Austria, where a perverted father kept his own daughter captive for an unbelievable 24 years. I remember being horrified at that cruel reality and used to read up on the newspaper reports in great detail. Compared to that incident, Room is much tamer in its content.

Room is narrated entirely from the point of view of the little boy. To this extent, it is akin to "To Kill a Mockingbird" in having a child narrator who seems wise beyond their years. However, unlike the classic, Room starts to get on your nerves after a point. Though the writing never fails in its accurate psychological depiction of what the impact of a quarantined existence might be in a little child's mind, in some scenes, it feels as if the writer is trying too hard and that desperation leads to a dissatisfied reading experience.

The first half of the book (the part within "Room") is still excellent and I zoomed through it in a night. It is the second half (about the "Outside") where the book falters and becomes too twisted. That said, I do want to say that I read the book with high expectations and that might also have sullied my actual experience. I was told that the book is a psychological fiction novel but it didn't feel like one.

I keep asking myself what would I have done if I were in that young mother's place. Would I have told the same stories to my little boy to make his existence seem less dreary and unfulfilled? That's where the book has left me pondering.

Overall, it is still an interesting book, quite unlike anything I've read before. Worth a one-time read.