Best-selling, award-winning novel and motion picture,
nominated for
four Academy Awards
Room is a good story from start to
finish. But what makes it so effective
and so captivating is that it is told in its entirely by one of its main
characters, Jack, in his five-year-old voice.
Jack has lived his entire life in
an 11x11 foot, windowless room. He was
born there. He and his "Ma"
eat, sleep, play and live there, intentionally hidden from the outside
world. At night Ma shuts Jack into the
wardrobe, safe and hopefully asleep when "Old Nick" chooses to visit.
But while "Room" is home
to Jack, to Ma it is the prison where she has been held captive for seven
years, since she was kidnapped when she was 19.
She is repeatedly raped by Old Nick who enters Room any night he
pleases. Jack is the result of one of
those rapes.
Jack's observations are bright,
often insightful and reflect the good education his mother has managed to give
him despite very limited tools. She
teaches him to read, to think and to question.
She makes up creative games to increase his vocabulary and give him a
love for books, hoping to prepare him somewhat for the outside world. Together they create "word
sandwiches"—if something is both cool and scary is is
"coolary." Jack's observations
when he finally is able to see the outside world through a window are all his own.
He calls the sun "God's face.”
While Ma is depressed and fiercely
determined to escape, she is loves her young son and creates the best life and
most loving environment she can for him,
But Jack's curiosity and her own
desperation are building and she knows she must find a way for them to escape
from Room. They make a harrowing escape
into the "Outside." But now
they must make huge and very different adjustments—Jack into a world full of
people, sunshine, wind, buildings, cars and loud unfamiliar sounds
everywhere. And Ma now finds herself in
a familiar but very changed world. While
her family and friends hoped and prayed she was still alive they could have had
no idea what her life had become: motherhood, repeated rapes, imprisonment in a
small room with no windows, completely cut off from the outside world.
Ma and Jack are frightened, but of
different things and for different reasons.
We watch them both in their separate struggles, hear Jack describe his
new world, his fear, awe, and his worry about his Ma and her own very different
struggle to adjust.
The continuing thread is the
unconquerable love and determination Jack and his Ma share—the diamond-hard
love between a mother and her child. — Gail Stilwill
