Room - A Book Review

I read Room in 2 days for one of my Book Clubs. I could not put the book down. I did not want to read it initially, a book narrated by a 5 year old child who was born in captivity and whose entire world consists of Room. No thank you. But, I can not stop thinking about it. I was looking at a friend from college's worst and best books for 2010, and she said that it was the best book for her of 2010. Her comment about Room being "ultimately the story of a power of a mother's love for her child" is what resonated with me about this book. I found this website that lets you put yourself in Room, and the perspective changes as if you are in Room.

Also found on that website is this quote by the author of Room, Emma Donoghue, "Our culture is constantly telling stories about psychos who capture women. I deliberately kept my kidnapper out of the spotlight. The more I read and thought about it, the more it seemed to me that there is no comfortably fixed moral distance between a kidnapper and the rest of us. (The existence of entire slave-owning societies reminded me that humans often find it both convenient and pleasurable to own others.) It was not Old Nick's evil that fascinated me, but the resilience of Ma and Jack: the nitty-gritties of their survival, their trick of more or less thriving under apparently unbearable conditions."

Room is a book that you will continue to think about, long after you have finished the last page. To me that is the sign of a great book, one that keeps coming to your mind, one that you keep thinking about, long after it is over.