Room is read by Michal Friedman, Ellen Archer, Robert Petkoff , and Suzanne Toren and they do a very good job of pulling you into the story of a woman and her five year old son who has spent his whole life in a small shack he knows as Room. Jack has names for everything in Room. Rug, Bed, TV, Skylight, Wall, Floor, and so on for the small assortment of items that fill the near identical days of the lives.
Told from Jack’s point of view, we experience the world as he sees and hears it-or as he has it explained to him, mostly by his Mother. Room is small, 11 foot by 11 foot, but it is the world to Jack. His daily routines revolve around Sunday Treat and the usual nightly visits by a man Jack knows only as Old Nick. His visits are announced by the beep-beep of the door.
At first I wasn’t sure about the exact nature of the story, if it was an abduction story or a post apocolypse tale of a survivor in a bomb shelter. The Mom has gone a bit mad over the years, but Jack doesn’t know any better. They watch a bit of TV, they read the same five books over and over again. They eat whatever Old Nick brings them. Mom has sex with Old Nick every night to keep Jack safe.
Little by little we learn about Room and Mom’s attempts to escape and Jack’s fairly happy existence. Not long after Jack’s fifth birthday, Mom has a daring plan to escape. Jack is no ordinary five year old, he has a large vocabulary, reads, has a good memory, and yet he has odd attachments to things like Mom’s rotten tooth that fell out and the dirty rug on Room’s floor.
I found the story wonderfully griping and I found myself thinking, what would I have done? Was there really no way out of Room? Was there nothing that could have been done to fight Old Nick? Life inside of Room is super structured down to exactly how many bits of ceral were for breakfast and how long to watch TV.
The first part of the book about life in Room is pretty amazing, the second part after the Great Escape is ok, and the last third where our heroes try to adjust to the Outside World seems to drag as nothing much happens. Room was a good book, but it had such a strong opening that everything else paled into unimportance after The Great Escape.
