Title: Room
Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Published: September 13, 2011
Source: Purchased 

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.
Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.
Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

The writing of this review is proving more tedious than actually reading it - just so you can gage the true depth of how bothersome this "inspirational" novel has been. I have tried to write this twice before, however, something has always driven me to close the browser. I didn't want to spend an exponential time on Room, it appears I have done so and for that I will never forgive myself. I plunged myself into the novel without any no preconceptions at all so I was not warned at how infuriating the read would be. 

There certainly an abundant part that makes this unbearable. Unless you are Scout Finch you do not work as a under-ten narrator - you really do not! A Five-year-old is cute in very small, very manageable portions. Jack's ignorance was at first really emotive but then I could not get over the fact that he is just so annoying. I couldn't deal with the "silly penis is standing up" that made a presence on every other page. 

There is an inconsistency within the novel that I found hard to overlook: Jack uses elevated lexis without much thought; the conventions of grammar, however, has completely escaped him. Emma Donoghue, why? I don't know why anyone who read the book would not pick up on this. If I were to be completely honest, I think this book is the best cover-up for a really bad writer; now, I have never read Donoghue's work before (alas, I will never again) so to say she is an awful writer would not be fair.

Think of completing fifty consecutive marathons before you tackle Mountain Kilimanjaro and then you have it; the time they were incarcerated is the marathons and the mountain is the last third of the novel. It was a battle to finish this book and I am very proud of myself for doing so. When I go to the end I was hoping for a party with cake - something to make it worthwhile - but, alas, Donoghue offered only sense of anger. Go get them, Emma!