ROOM has been highly praised and rightly so. It's an original, a voice that one has never heard before, perhaps not as original as Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield but original still, like the Twins in THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS. We see the world through the eyes of five year old Jack, a precocious and brave child, as you will find out from reading. What makes him special is that for the first five years of his life, his total universe is a room, with no windows, just a skylight, a place that came to be his home, the inside and outside, his world. The first third of the book describes his life in this enclosed space with his mother and occasionally, Old Nick. Why they are there we discover in this part. The second and third parts describe Jack's acclimation to life outside of the room, to his discovery of not only other people like family and friends, but to the natural world as well as the modern world of computers, TV, video games, cars and airplanes, all unknown to him in the first part. His gradual acceptance of this world, it's difficulties and successes, with family and others, forms the rest of the book. His point of view must accept change, turning from what he thought was the world (the room), to what he only assumed was make believe, the real world. How he accomplishes this transformation forms the guts of the book. It seems very real to me and Jack's thoughts, his questions, his difficulties adjusting all ring true. The joy is seeing things that we take for granted from his point of view. By the end, I was getting tired of this but for most of the book, I was transfixed, pulled in, unaware of the self, as she drew me in so well.
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