Room by Emma Donoghue 🔖🔖🔖

This is a book that I would not necessarily recommend to others. It was quite a task to write a book from the perspective of a five-year old and Donoghue does an excellent job for the most part. Building Jack's character was well done and it was easy to relate to him and be drawn into his experience. There was good character development for the others in the book, but it wasn't in a way to deeply draw you to them, but that may have been her intent. The book is in Jack's view, after all.

There are two main things that drew this away from a higher rating for me. One of those I admit is anal on my part. It is simply the fact that the woman has been in captivity for 7 years and somehow her teeth are so rotten she's in constant pain and her 5-year old comments on the rotting condition of the teeth (and yes, she had a toothbrush). Surely we know many people who have avoided dentists for years and not had rotting teeth. Maybe I missed something here, but it felt out of place for me. Like I prefaced, I know that's pretty anal on my part.

The second main thing that detracted from more stars for me was the author's need to have the narrator actually voice the social commentary she's trying to get at. First of all, this is annoying when any author does this. Trust your writing skills to get the point across without having to come out with it. Trust your readers to be smart enough to catch on. In this case, the character with the insight is not only 5 years old, but a 5-year old who has lived in a room all his life. He's really going to have this kind of insight enough to come up with social commentary? One example: “In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time...I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well...I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.”

Regardless, this was well done. Yet I almost feel like I wasted my time on this one.