ROOM

ROOM by Emma Donoghue was read for the Just for Fun Reading Challenge 2011.

From the back of the book:

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world.  It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn.  At night, Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where Jack is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years.  Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space.  But Jack's curiosity is building alongside Ma's own desperation - and she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.

Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating - a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child.

There has been a lot of hype about this book - and it lives up to every bit of it.  What a fantastic book!

I bought this book in the Orlando airport and started reading it while waiting for my plane to board.  If I hadn't been right in front of the desk, I probably wouldn't have heard them call my flight.  I read it on the plane and didn't realize the plane had taken off or landed.  I read it on the train from the airport and didn't know I had reached the final stop.

It's hard to imagine what life must have been like for Ma and Jack.  Narrated entirely by Jack, it gives a view of the world from his eyes.  Shut up in a room with no windows and only a skylight to briefly see the sky, a television to watch cartoons, and no contact at all with the outside world, Jack has no idea of what Outside is like.  But Ma knows and wants to be out there again, and will do whatever she must to be free of her prison.

Please, if you read any books this year, read this one.  Without a doubt, the best book I have read in a long, long time.