Room

Emma Donoghue 2010

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
trauma survival mental health family literary fiction

Our Take

Jack has never known anything outside the room where he was born captive, and Donoghue makes his innocence the most painful thing in the novel. His mother's endurance is superhuman and costs her everything. The outside world is not rescue — it is another kind of imprisonment, and the book doesn't pretend otherwise.

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