Room by Emma Donoghue

About the book: To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. . . . It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.


Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.

Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating--a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child.
 
First line: Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra.
 
My thoughts:  This story, told from the POV of the 5 year old child, was not as horrifying as if it had been told from the mother's POV. The child just told everything as day-to-day happenings. (What made this book so horrific to me is that it was loosely based on a real case, the Josef Fritzl case. Fritzl kept his 7 SEVEN children with her. I will post the link to the info below.)
 
What shined was the mother's love of her child. She spent the days trying to keep him healthy through exercise and feeding him as well as she could depending on what was provided by Old Nick. She also schooled him.  For his whole five years of life, he has never been outside of Room. It is his entire existence and he loves everything in it: Rug, Table, Wardrobe etc. My heart broke for him as he had to learn to deal with life outside of Room.

I listened to this book rather than reading it and found the child's voice....distracting.  
Quote: We do Bowling with Bouncy Ball and Wordy Ball, and knock down vitamin bottles that we put different heads on when I was four, like Dragon and Alien and Princess and Crocodile, I win the most. I practice my adding and subtracting and sequences and multiplying and dividing and writing down the biggest numbers there are. Ma sews me two new puppets out of little socks from when I was a baby, they've got smiles of stitches and all different button eyes.


Challenges:
100+
What's In a Name 5

Eve by Iris Johansen

About the book: Could John Gallo, a man from Eve’s past, be the missing piece to the puzzle that has haunted her for years? Why was he in Atlanta just before Bonnie’s disappearance? Find out in this brilliant narrative that goes back to Eve Duncan’s early life, exploring her history and motivations like no other novel before.


Finally the answers surrounding the disappearance of Eve Duncan’s daughter, Bonnie, will be revealed in EVE, the first book in a spellbinding trilogy from Iris Johansen.

My Thoughts: I have been keeping up with Eve Duncan and Joe for years. As usual, Eve tries to cut Joe out because she doesn't want him to be hurt. And as usual he goes along anyway. This is something that has not set well with me over the course of the series. Poor Joe. by the end of this novel I knew a lot more about Eve than had ever been revealed before and a lot more about Bonnie's kidnapping. Of course it is the first in a trilogy within the series so the end was left in a cliff hanger. Of course I'll have to read the other two.

Rating: B-