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A review by sidharthvardhan
Room by Emma Donoghue
4.0
The thing is I don’t like kids. Whenever I see one, I feel like making it cry. I have similar allergies for things that are called ‘cute’ – stuff toys, puppies etc. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that ‘cute’ is a word you use for things that provoke your destructive instincts.
With kids, it is okay as long as they are sleeping or being stupid under someone else’s care. You know, you could even fake ‘how cute he is’ or a 'cuchie cuchie co' to get into their parents’ good books … but my instincts start getting out of control if I have to listen to them for more than two minutes. And all they talk about is the stupid magic powers they think they have, food etc.
And so, you can guess I found Jack annoying. I guess no one can listen to a kid for 300 pages. Than, there are the restrictions that come with first person narratives. I don’t think he is capable of telling his own emotions or his own perspective, as an omniscient narrator would have - leave alone trying to step into others' shoes.
Once, his mother tells him about her miscarriage just after he has suffered the trauma of her life – because that is the only way author could have forward the information; by telling you an example of a caring and loving mother is telling her traumatized five year old son about miscarriage from before his birth. I could have understood it if she had done the same in the room where she had no one else to talk to, but now she have the whole world to talk to, right!
Also, I mean how is a kid who could hardly remember more than two sentences from television could remember the whole dialogues and events - especially when his whole concept of reality has been disturbed. Is he writing a memoir or telling the story or what?
Then there is the fact that ‘ma’ suffers too many tragedies to be convincing, we have in that order – abortion, kidnapping, isolation, repeated rapes, miscarriage, emotional breakdown in front of camera and an attempted suicide. I don’t like it when authors seem to be using their characters as if they were punching bags.
Still, there are beautiful parts. The first chapter is done incredibly well and must have required all kind of imagination - an ode to a mother's love. It is beautiful world created by Ma for her child which seems to have taken him (and along with him, us) away from her own suffering. He could never imagine suffering - and so that is left for the reader to imagine.
The idea itself had a lot of potential – isolation for rapes, Jack being almost a feral kid (I could like to find more fiction about feral children’s psychology - the only other fictional feral child I know of is Mowgli) etc. but I guess author wasn’t as much interested in these things as she was in the relationship between a mother and a child. Jack’s coming out of his little paradise is handled well, but not well enough. Then there is how people react to incidences like these. I knew that media is all full of greedy dogs, what is up with medical and police procedures there?
you could see the hard work put in there but frankly there was needed a lot more. That’s what happen when a great idea is coupled with an average writing – it did only a fraction of what it could.
With kids, it is okay as long as they are sleeping or being stupid under someone else’s care. You know, you could even fake ‘how cute he is’ or a 'cuchie cuchie co' to get into their parents’ good books … but my instincts start getting out of control if I have to listen to them for more than two minutes. And all they talk about is the stupid magic powers they think they have, food etc.
And so, you can guess I found Jack annoying. I guess no one can listen to a kid for 300 pages. Than, there are the restrictions that come with first person narratives. I don’t think he is capable of telling his own emotions or his own perspective, as an omniscient narrator would have - leave alone trying to step into others' shoes.
Once, his mother tells him about her miscarriage just after he has suffered the trauma of her life – because that is the only way author could have forward the information; by telling you an example of a caring and loving mother is telling her traumatized five year old son about miscarriage from before his birth. I could have understood it if she had done the same in the room where she had no one else to talk to, but now she have the whole world to talk to, right!
Also, I mean how is a kid who could hardly remember more than two sentences from television could remember the whole dialogues and events - especially when his whole concept of reality has been disturbed. Is he writing a memoir or telling the story or what?
Then there is the fact that ‘ma’ suffers too many tragedies to be convincing, we have in that order – abortion, kidnapping, isolation, repeated rapes, miscarriage, emotional breakdown in front of camera and an attempted suicide. I don’t like it when authors seem to be using their characters as if they were punching bags.
Still, there are beautiful parts. The first chapter is done incredibly well and must have required all kind of imagination - an ode to a mother's love. It is beautiful world created by Ma for her child which seems to have taken him (and along with him, us) away from her own suffering. He could never imagine suffering - and so that is left for the reader to imagine.
The idea itself had a lot of potential – isolation for rapes, Jack being almost a feral kid (I could like to find more fiction about feral children’s psychology - the only other fictional feral child I know of is Mowgli) etc. but I guess author wasn’t as much interested in these things as she was in the relationship between a mother and a child. Jack’s coming out of his little paradise is handled well, but not well enough. Then there is how people react to incidences like these. I knew that media is all full of greedy dogs, what is up with medical and police procedures there?
you could see the hard work put in there but frankly there was needed a lot more. That’s what happen when a great idea is coupled with an average writing – it did only a fraction of what it could.