For instance, I love the way 5-year-olds try to make the past tense regular - they all say, 'I eated! I winned!' ' And then I chose just a few of those classic 5-year-old traits to give to his speech. 'I followed him around like an anthropologist - writing down his strange grammar. 'I charted my son's language,' Donoghue explains. Though Jack is a 'very peculiar version of a 5-year-old,' Donoghue wanted his speech to line up with the speech of any 5-year-old boy learning language in the real world. Donoghue says she did not want it to feel as though Jack and his mother were living a 'stunted version' of the American lifestyle.ĭonoghue says that her own 5-year-old son, Finn, was a great help to her in finding the voice of her young narrator. The Room itself is a character of its own in the novel - it's capitalized, as is everything it contains - Lamp, Toothpaste, Table. His discovery that they are prisoners shatters his worldview. All that Jack reads in books and all he sees on TV he thinks is pure fiction.

In fact, Old Nick is their captor - he kidnapped Jack's mother when she was 19. Jack thinks that he and his mother are the only two real humans, and Old Nick - the man who visits every couple of nights - is perhaps borderline human. 'He's spent five years thinking that he's in this world with his mother, and that outside there's outer space with stars and planets zooming around.' 'What Jack discovers early on - which is a complete shock to him - is that Room is not all there is,' Donoghue tells NPR's Melissa Block. The setting is an 11-by-11-foot room where he lives with his mother - and when the book begins, it is the only world he has ever known. The captivating novel by Irish writer Emma Donoghue is matter-of-factly narrated by a 5-year-old named Jack. It isn't easy to talk about Room without giving too much away. Her latest novel, Room, has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Irish playwright and novelist Emma Donoghue is also the author of the novels The Sealed Letter, Stir Fry, Hood and Slammerkin.

Room by emma donoghue summary