"Room" by Emma Donoghue (2010)

 

From the perspective of a five-year-old boy, Room tells the story of how the boy and his mother are locked up in a room for several years.

I'm not gonna treat Room like America's sweetheart Meryl Streep. Just because it deals with a painful, heart-wrenching experience and received high praise doesn't mean it's immune from objective criticism.

So...

I'm not gonna lie. This didn't click with me. I thought it would. A friend of mine likes it. People on GoodReads like it. The guys from the Academy Awards like the movie. So, what's wrong? I must be the odd one out. 

I was soldiering my way through from the beginning until the end (with the exception of the 40~50% bit which was the escape). There were times when I wanted to quit, but I had to give it another chance, and another, and another...

One of the major turn-offs for me was the author's choice to tell the story from the perspective of a very young boy, and not a normal one at that given the circumstances he found himself in. I respect her choice. It's her story after all. In fact, I found it extremely creative and imaginative, but after some time, it gets frustrating to the point of annoyance. For example, the way his thoughts/sentences/paragraphs are crammed together in a stream of consciousness kind of way and his constant 'butting in' in certain exchanges where we, as readers, wanted to know what's happening.

But I could deal with that. What I couldn't deal with was the fact that his perspective was like a dam between me and the other characters' emotions. Their feelings weren't accessible to me. In the case of short stories, it's solvable by the technique of inferring and extensive reliance on pragmatics. But when you're talking about a four-hundred-page-long book, the experience is so tiring and you feel like you're drifting through space. I'm not saying it's a hard book to read. It's just exhausting, mostly annoying, and not rewarding at all.

Summary:

If you're reading Room as a thriller, you're doing it wrong. It's not about escaping but rather about the trauma that arises from such an escape. The book raises questions about the development of children, about PTSD, and the trauma that survivors of rape and imprisonment are going through.

If you're into heartbreaking stories, this is for you.  This book is like raising a child. To enjoy it best, you have to be really patient.