"Room" by Emma Donohue

Because I feel that everything I've posted thus far has been atypically superficial and silly, I now give you a more meaty and satisfying book review.  I'm currently reading Emma Donohue's novel "Room", which was recommended to me by one of my favorite English professors.  This book is not for the faint of heart.  It is the gut wrenching, heart breaking, narrative of a young boy who spends the first five years of his life in a single room with his kidnapped mother.  Jack's mother was abducted in a parking lot seven years ago by a perverted psychopath, who she comes to know as Old Nick.  She is kept in a garden shed that her captor has fashioned into a kind of impenetrable panic room, where he forces her to have sex with him.  Old Nick is Jack's father, though his mother just tells her son that he is a gift from above.  "Room" is told from the perspective of five year old Jack, and it is Donohue's deftness at writing from the point of view of a child who has grown up in the most extraordinary circumstances that makes this novel so devastatingly beautiful.  Emma Donohue renders a provocative portrait of a boy who knows nothing of the outside world, and who considers Room to be his one and only home.  The two get rescued through a daring attempt on the part of Jack, but once they are free, Jack feels displaced and homesick.  I'm not done the book, yet, but the two are currently staying at a rehabilitation/mental health facility, and attempting to re-assimilate into society.

I highly recommend "Room" as a haunting, relevant, narrative that illustrates the unimaginable evil that unfortunately exists in the world.