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