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.