Emma Donnohue's Room is not a book that I normally would have read being allergic to Booker hype but I was staying in a house that had a copy so I took it up. I hardly left it down until it was read. It is told from the perspective of Jack a just 5 year old and the setting is that of a garden shed in which he and his mother are the captives of a man that is referred to as Old Nick. Jack has been born into captivity and to him the TV which they have is no more than images from the dream time with no connection to any free reality. Ma knows that from now on this reality must be adjusted and the real nature of their predicament made clear so she begins to raise that magical diaphane on the misty neverland of Dora the Explorer.
It seems to me that Donohue has brought us into a world that does not bear thinking about, one of profound horror and anxiety as we jog along in the banality of evil hoping that they may somehow escape and that their captor will in turn get a room of his own in the big house. Good read.
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