Verdict: Amazing read overall..one of the best books I have ever read till now.
Jan-2011
Had bought this book from Landmark(Forum mall, Bangalore) back in Sep-2010. As part of my reading-shift from the normal paperback fiction to buying award-winning and ManBooker long/short listed books, saw that this book had been longlisted for the ManBooker prize for 2010.
The premise seemed very interesting, herez the summary on the back of the book which caught my eye:
"Jack is five, and excited about his birthday. He lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures eleven feet by eleven feet. He loves watching TV and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real-only him,Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there is a world outside.
Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other...."
Started reading this sometime in October, but the initial language and the writeup flummoxed and was a bit confused. Parallely at that time, I started off reading Mallu literature, so this went onto the back foot.
Finally after reading 2-3 Mallu books, I wanted to get back to English books and picked it up again.
To summarize, this is one of the best books I have ever read...amazingly well written taking such a plot and weaving a whole story around it.
One of the reviews written on the front cover of the book neatly describes the exact feeling I had:
"Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it's over, you look up; the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days" --Audrey Niffenegger(author of Time Traveller's wife)
I had read reviews about this book on the net earlier and came to know that its loosely based on the Josef Fritzl case which emerged in April 2008 and shocked the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case
(don't want to be a spoiler...you can read the wiki after finishing the book)
The book talks about a similar plotline where Ma and Jack and the Room are the central characters in the plot and to create a story and told from Jack's perspective, you get sucked into a world where everything is within a 11 x 11 room, day n night, week after week, and 7 years !!
The first half is amazingly fast paced and you crave for more (dont want to be a spoiler) but the second half kind of slows down but still you feel like turning onto the next page and see how it goes and it ends fine.
Even in the first part, some of the portions seem repetitive and boring, but didnt dampen the overall spirit thought.
Finished off the book within a week, was unputdownable.... A word of caution though..if you plannin to teach someone English, its not the best of books as it has a lot of grammatically incorrect wordings and usages :-)...
But a dazzling use of language and incredible imagination to describe how a mother entertains and brings up her kid for 5 years in solitary confinement in a Room which is the only world the child has seen...so the different techniques to keep him occupied throughout the day and creating a fairy-tale world...awesome, to say the least...
Jan-2011
Had bought this book from Landmark(Forum mall, Bangalore) back in Sep-2010. As part of my reading-shift from the normal paperback fiction to buying award-winning and ManBooker long/short listed books, saw that this book had been longlisted for the ManBooker prize for 2010.
The premise seemed very interesting, herez the summary on the back of the book which caught my eye:
"Jack is five, and excited about his birthday. He lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures eleven feet by eleven feet. He loves watching TV and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real-only him,Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there is a world outside.
Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other...."
Started reading this sometime in October, but the initial language and the writeup flummoxed and was a bit confused. Parallely at that time, I started off reading Mallu literature, so this went onto the back foot.
Finally after reading 2-3 Mallu books, I wanted to get back to English books and picked it up again.
To summarize, this is one of the best books I have ever read...amazingly well written taking such a plot and weaving a whole story around it.
One of the reviews written on the front cover of the book neatly describes the exact feeling I had:
"Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it's over, you look up; the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days" --Audrey Niffenegger(author of Time Traveller's wife)
I had read reviews about this book on the net earlier and came to know that its loosely based on the Josef Fritzl case which emerged in April 2008 and shocked the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case
(don't want to be a spoiler...you can read the wiki after finishing the book)
The book talks about a similar plotline where Ma and Jack and the Room are the central characters in the plot and to create a story and told from Jack's perspective, you get sucked into a world where everything is within a 11 x 11 room, day n night, week after week, and 7 years !!
 |
| Emma Donoghue |
Even in the first part, some of the portions seem repetitive and boring, but didnt dampen the overall spirit thought.
Finished off the book within a week, was unputdownable.... A word of caution though..if you plannin to teach someone English, its not the best of books as it has a lot of grammatically incorrect wordings and usages :-)...
But a dazzling use of language and incredible imagination to describe how a mother entertains and brings up her kid for 5 years in solitary confinement in a Room which is the only world the child has seen...so the different techniques to keep him occupied throughout the day and creating a fairy-tale world...awesome, to say the least...
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