The Room!!!

I loved this book!!! I basically got through it in one weekend.

What was most striking to me about the first half of the book (pre-escape) was how the Mom created such order so that they would not go crazy. She created a strict schedule from meal times to the time that they would wash their clothes. I imagine that creating a schedule like that helped to pass the time. It was a way to mask the fact that they had an indefinite period confined in a Room. What concerned me about the way that she set up their life was that it seemed like Jack was developing OCD. He learned to be very concerned about germs. He became so comfortable with a routine and was very uneasy if any part of that routine was altered. He also seemed to count EVERYTHING.

I found myself constantly laughing out loud and smiling as I was reading the book (post escaping the Room). You not only get to see the world through a child, but through a child who thought that everything was only on TV. The observations that he makes are so simple, yet they often reveal things that we just don’t talk about or don’t like to think about. Like when he explains to the nurse that his Mom is “here but not really” or when he says “lots of the world seems to be a repeat.”

While the mother undeniably did everything for Jack’s sake, there are several large decisions that she made for him that I am still trying to decide whether they were the best things for him. The biggest one was brought up by {I am assuming} Oprah. Should she have told Nick to bring Jack to the hospital as soon as he was born? We don’t even know if Nick would have done that. For one, he seemed to think that he was doing her a favor by allowing her to have a child- maybe he saw this as a way to keep her quiet and obedient. He also seemed like a pretty paranoid person- would he have dropped the baby off and risked having someone find out about his crime? But if he did, would she have been able to do it? Would I have been able to do it? The second big thing for me was whether she should have lied to Jack about everything being TV? My initial thought is that it saved him from wanting things that he could not have (which is why I believe she did not allow him to watch commercials). However, she then very abruptly told him one day that those things actually were real. When I was reading, it did not feel like she had planned any of this- it just sort of came out when she was feeling frustrated with everything.

I absolutely loved the Grandma’s character. She did not allow Jack to let his fears consume him, and while she did tell him this in often blunt ways you can tell that she was doing so out of love for him. A lot of people would have tip-toed around Jack, seeing him as “damaged” and needing special attention. But she gave him just what he needed- a stern figure who showed him that he could be normal.

Catherine Earnshaw