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Healthy ambition is a laudable trait and I admire people willing to reach beyond their grasp in the attempt to achieve something special.


I respect the author’s choice to write a dark-themed story narrated entirely from the perspective of a five year old boy. While the unreliable narrator is nothing new in literature, its deployment here felt fresh and so I give points for that.

Unfortunately, that is about all I can give points for because the novel itself was a huge miss for me. Huge!!

Obviously, the story is intended to be an emotional ordeal with its depiction of a young woman and her 5 year old son being held captive in a garden shack (the eponymous “Room��) by a sociopath named “Old Nick.�� At the beginning of the story, the woman, who was 19 when she was abducted, has been in the Room for almost 10 years. Her son, Jack, just turned 5...you can do the math regarding Jack’s paternity. Neither of them has been outside the Room in all that time.

This is dark stuff. This is uncomfortable stuff. This is a story about a horrible person doing horrible things. It should have punched me in the core and twisted me up in knots.

Yet it never affected me.

Now, if I was a cold, empathy-impaired individual, I might chalk up my lack of reaction to a simple case of “not my kind of story�� and leave it at that. However, if you’ve read any of my reviews, you should have clued into the fact that I’m a deeply some would say overly emotional reader. Books move me, that’s why I read them. They make me laugh, cry, rage, exult…they make me feel. Yet, despite the highly charged subject matter of the story, no more than an occasional trickle of emotion ever filtered through to me from the page.

Something was serious amiss in the delivery.

Given my blasé reaction to the story, I began to suspect that the use of a child narrator was nothing more than a huge gimmick designed to help distinguish a story that otherwise had very little to recommend it. I know that's not the consensus opinion, but it's honestly how I felt.

To be fair, it’s more likely that the use of Jack as the narrator, while an interesting plot device, simply presented too many serious challenges that the novel, unfortunately, was unable to successfully overcome. To the good, the author does a nice job of showing us the world of Room through the lens of Jack’s childhood perception. We learn how Jack has named and anthropomorphized every object in the room and thinks of them as his friends, and how he refers to each channel on the TV as a different planet.

Initially, this is kind of cute, but it got old and decrepit in short order.

The real problem for me was that Jack was too detached from the horror of his situation and it care-blocked the impact of the story on the reader…at least this reader. Children Jack’s age, while certainly able to show empathy, are generally so egocentric that any feelings of compassion for another’s pain are weak and undeveloped, being more about parroting behavior they’ve learned from caregivers than a true placing of themselves “in the shoes�� of the other person.

Unfortunately, this worked against my connection with the narrative. Jack’s happy-go-lucky outlook was too strong a filter between what I could tell was happening in the story and what I knew I was supposed to be feeling about it. Jack’s personal, subjective experience of his captivity is completely lacking in any sense of sadness or dread. This is because his mother does a wonderful job of sheltering him from the reality of their situation.

However, Jack also doesn’t experience feelings of discomfort about the abuse that his mother is subjected to and this subtracts a great deal from the power of these scenes. Without his own internal sense of bewilderment, confinement or pain, much of the intended poignancy was lost on me. I knew I was supposed to feel something, but I didn't.

That’s just me. If I had found the emotional tether that could have pulled me into the Room with Jack and his mother, my feelings for the book would have been much different. The writing is fine and the author’s ability to convincingly give voice to Jack was worthy of note. I just never found the necessary connection and that is a shame.

I envy those of you that loved this as I was really looking forward to reading it.

2.0 stars.