room by emma donoghue

I always have little patience for precocious children in literature (which gave my children’s literature professor back in college some serious head-scratching), but Emma Donoghue’s novel “Room” is surprisingly worthy of enduring. It doesn’t feel like you have to endure at all, even if you are reading the words of a five-year-old from the very first page. It is not entirely new, the language and the technique (there is Mark Haddon’s novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, and there’s Marguerite Alcazaren De Leon’s short story “Yaya”), but what’s notable here is how everything moves logically and breathtakingly from Point A to Point B. To sum it all up, the title’s subject is (could be) much bigger than anything else you have read lately.