Room, by Emma Donoghue

"Imagine living within the confines of a 12x12 room, the only natural light coming from a skylight, a television your only link to the outside world. That’s just what Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue does in Room, a book so original and daring it recently landed on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize. To five-year-old Jack, Room is his entire world, where he was born and where he lives with Ma, where he learns and plays. It is also where, at night, Jack crawls into Wardrobe to sleep, and to hide when Old Nick visits his mother (when the bed squeaks). For Jack, Room is the only home he’s ever known, but for Ma it’s a prison where she’s been held captive for seven years after being abducted at the age of 19. If this sounds like the stuff of tabloids, luridly sensational or gimmicky, in Donoghue’s talented hands it’s anything but.Told from Jack’s perspective, Room turns the usual victim/survivor story on its head, transforming it into something else entirely—a meditation on the nature of reality and a testament to the ferocity of a mother’s love." (Bookpage Review, 9/2010)

From author Emma Donoghue: "Room is a book about the smallest of worlds, and the biggest.... In my experience, the bond between mother and newborn is a tiny, cozy world that gradually relaxes its magic to let the rest of the world in...Our culture is constantly telling stories about psychos who capture women. I deliberately kept my kidnapper out of the spotlight. The more I read and thought about it, the more it seemed to me that there is no comfortably fixed moral distance between a kidnapper and the rest of us. (The existence of entire slave-owning societies reminded me that humans often find it both convenient and pleasurable to own others.) It was not Old Nick’s evil that fascinated me, but the resilience of Ma and Jack: the nitty-gritties of their survival, their trick of more or less thriving under apparently unbearable conditions."

Tales and Talk book discussion group members found Donoghue's novel excellent fare for discussion. The following is a list of the questions we bandied about. Feel free to post more, elaborate with answers, and generally chime in on this fascinating book!

1. Why do you think she chose to tell this story from Jack’s point of view? (I.e. from the point of view of a 5 year old?)
2. Why do you think she never tells us anything about Old Nick? (E.g. his real name, his background, etc.)
3. Were you bothered that Ma had not weaned Jack? Why do you think she was still breastfeeding him at such a late age?
4. How would you have taught Jack the difference between “real” and “Outside” and “Room?”
5. What did you think about her father’s reaction to Jack?
6. What purpose does her being adopted serve in the story?