Room by Emma Donoghue

Note: There are minor spoilers in this review. I don’t consider them book-ruining spoilers, and I wouldn’t direct you away from this page if you intend to read this book, but consider yourself warned.

I’d read a lot of reviews of this book before I picked it up myself. It earned praise from reviewers and readers alike, and while the premise sounds sinister (a man is holding a young woman captive in a room with no access to the outside world; her son was born there, and it is the only world he has ever known), I didn’t get the impression that the book itself was sinister. I did get the impression that the entire novel took place in that one room, though, and so when I first started reading I felt kind of claustrophobic. I found the first fifty pages or so very engaging as we got to know the space from the child's perspective, and to see how his mother had provided him with a surprisingly rich life within such an awful and constrained situation, but I didn’t know if I could spend 300 pages in that same space.

So I was surprised when the author suddenly removed the characters, and the readers, from that space only partway into the book. It was a relief, but it happened faster than I was expecting and I found it disorienting (in a literary sense). Since most of the first part of the book is spent setting up a world in great detail, you kind of expect that you'll be staying in that world for awhile. The narrator is the five-year-old, who doesn’t even know that a world exists outside the room, and Donoghue does a remarkable job of creating an authentic voice for the boy and his perspective is convincing. Removing him suddenly from the only world he knows is beyond disorienting for the boy, and so I suppose that it ought to be disorienting for readers as well. But it took me some time to get past the abruptness and to buy into the change. Maybe if I had expected it from the beginning I would have made the transition more easily.

Still, overall I really enjoyed the book. The book was less about the story than about the perspective from which it's told, and I thought Emma Donoghue handled the perspective incredibly well, if not faultlessly. To write from the perspective from a child without sounding too adult is difficult. To have that child tell a story that speaks to adult perspectives is more difficult still. And to write from the perspective of a child whose entire known world is constrained to a single known room, then thrust him into the world that all of us know and see what happens, takes a level of creativity that I really admire.

The story was dark at times, and sad at times, but it was also hopeful. I'm glad I read it.