Room

Reading book reviews is mostly for building lists for when you're a little short on inspiration. That was my case. I didn't know where I got the recommendation from, I didn't know what he was talking about, but his reviews were glowing. And rightly so. But there is a but.

Summary

The premise is fantastic. The narrator, Jack, is a child, just turned five, and he is celebrating his birthday with his mother. He plays with her all day, watches TV, exercises around the bed.

Gradually, we feel that something is wrong. Jack never leaves the room. Neither does the mother. For food, they rely on a man who makes his rounds every Sunday. The mother obviously doesn't like him, and hides Jack in the closet every time. Jack counts the number of squick-squicks they make on the bed, then the man leaves.

One day, the mother raises her voice, and to punish her, the man cuts off the power to the room. The frozen beans thawed and were left without heat or light for days. The mother decides that enough is enough. They will run away.

Impressions

I absolutely fell in love with the first few pages. The style reminded me of The Life Before Uswith the naive and original language of the narrator who discovers the world.

I loved how gradually, along with the child, you begin to understand the situation. I went from being touched, to puzzled, to horrified and anxious. The escape was frighteningly stressful. Impossible to let go of the book during this passage.

And then, about halfway through the book, everything is resolved. The suspense was over. And I was disappointed. It was way too fast for my taste: the escape, which was really the most exciting part of the novel, went off without too much trouble and after that, there was nothing left to resolve. I really wondered what could happen next.

It's not that the rest was irrelevant: we follow Jack in his discovery of the outside world and his mother in her rehabilitation. But the first part, very skillfully done, had prepared me for a suspense, and that's what I wanted. In comparison, the rest of it felt flat. I finished it mostly because I was hoping for something else to happen afterwards.

The first half really made me want to recommend it to you and give it as a gift to everyone around you. But I won't do that, unfortunately. Instead, I'll stay on the lookout for a real good thriller.