Jack is five and excited about his birthday. He lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight and measures eleven feet by eleven feet. He loves watching TV and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside ...

Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting.

This prize-nominated novel created a bit of a challenge to some of our readers. Not because of its level of literary complexity ... more due to the narrative style. I believe we heard more comments relating to this than ever before. Telling such a confronting and thought provoking story through the eyes of a five year old is not just difficult, it is extremely courageous!

There were those of us that believed Donoghue had done a brilliant job on the narration, others believed not so well and frankly found it tedious, implausible, tiresome and inconsistent.
Everyone found the plot well developed though, and there were some comparisons to The Road, but it was agreed that it did not hold up well beside McCarthy's brilliance, and this is where most of us felt that the writing lacked something instrumental in making this story truly enthralling.

However, there is no doubt that this book left us with enough material for a great discussion. Particularly on childhood development and this story's real-life counterparts; some recently reported abductions. But generally the view was that Room was missing something very important ... that special something that demands and gets total involvement from the reader.

D.H. Lawrence's controversial novel written in 1928, which tells the story of an aristocratic woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley) who has an affair with the estate's gamekeeper when her husband is paralyzed and rendered impotent. Central to the theme of the novel is the need for physical as well as mental stimulation in order to feel complete as a human being.

Due to the offensive language and subject matter of the book, a charge of obscenity was brought against it in a famous 1960 trial in the UK. The novel and Lawrence were cleared of the charges and for the first time the book was allowed to be published without restriction.

This month our group was to acknowledge yet another positive for book clubs; they can force your hand and get you reading that one book you know you should read, but have never got around to.
After 10 years, our club now purposely works on rounding out our reading experiences and includes many of the classics that we know should be read. Hence last month's book Lady Chatterley's Lover, the controversial classic that spent many years underground and banned from library and bookstore shelves.

Our views were on the conservative side with the term 'over-rated' being mentioned, but that seemed to be more of a comment on the years of hype that the book enjoyed than anything else.

Many found the descriptive passages wonderfully written and Lawrence's social comment within the book brilliantly done. We believe the theme of 'class' was sorely missing from the film versions and felt the explicit sexual references stole much of this book's main subject matter.

Regardless, our entire group felt it was worth the reading and enjoyed a lively discussion of D.H. Lawrence and his times. And we got to tick off another classic from our list!