Room- Emma Donoghue

My recommendation of Room to several of my friends is one that motivated the starting of a blog, so why not start there?

Room, I cannot stress enough, is weird.  Weird, intense, and physically impossible to put down once you’re sucked in. That thing I was talking about that always happens at the incredibly inconvenient time of 10pm on a Tuesday? And then suddenly it’s 2am and you have to get up in four hours? The entire middle section of Room is like that, and that’s your warning. I hit the un-put-down-able section at about 10:30 on a Monday night, told myself to stop reading every half hour from then on, and wound up not actually putting the book down until around midnight. And even after that I couldn’t sleep.

That being said, I have to return again to how weird it is.  The basic premise of the book is that the five year old narrator has lived his entire life in one room with his mother and a creepy man that comes in the middle of the night and brings them all of their supplies to live. I don’t think the following sentence is that much of a spoiler, but if you’re crazy about those kinds of things, you might not want to read this next part: As it turns out, the boy’s mother was abducted at 19, is being kept in this room by the creepy old man, and the boy is a product of one of many rapes.  I told you it was weird.  But engrossing and intense nonetheless. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

4- just because after the intense middle part, it slows down significantly. It’s still interesting, but none of the end is something I would read rather than sleeping.