Room

by Emma Donoghue (Back Bay Books, 2010)

Five-year-old Jack has never been outside of the small room where his mother has been held captive for seven years, and he has never spoken to another human being other than Ma, who makes sure he is hidden in the wardrobe during the nightly visits of her captor to her bed. Although they have a television, Jack believes that the people and things he sees on TV aren’t real like him and Ma. Even the person he calls Old Nick does not seem quite real to him, and he cannot imagine Outside at all. The individual things in his world (Room, Wall, Ceiling, Bed, Table, Spider, Toilet, Eggsnake, etc.) are the only things that matter. Jack’s Ma has somehow managed to structure their lives to include reading, cooking, cleaning, exercising, playing, and talking.  It is as if Jack spent his formative years in complete isolation, like Genie or the Wild Boy of Aveyron; but unlike them, Jack had his mother to talk to him, read to him, tell him stories, and teach him, with the result that not only does Jack have language–his language is very sophisticated for his age.

Jack and Ma do almost everything together, with what little they are allowed. It is enough for Jack, but not for his mother, who, of course, must still submit to the sexual predator who keeps them locked up in this soundproofed shed in his back yard. After Old Nick cuts the power to the shed for three long, freezing days, she decides she cannot wait any longer to act, and she plans a daring escape, using Jack as her tool. (That particular chapter made me so anxious I raced through it to find out what happened and then had to go back and reread it for the details!)

The last part of the book describes Jack’s gradual adjustment to life Outside. This part is very compelling. Never having known the wider world outside Room, Jack longs to return to the one place he really felt safe. When he finally does go back, he finds it different from how he remembered it, but he also finds closure.

Written in the language of a very precocious child, Room is accessible to high intermediate and advanced English language learners.

People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks (Adobe EPUB eBook)

It’s pretty ironic to be reading this particular book as an eBook, because it is about the discovery in postwar Sarajevo and restoration of a medieval Haggadah (Passover prayer book) and is all about the physical book: binding, pages, tiny little bits of detritus stuck therein… But my Nook has been crashing tonight, really irritating (only a month old after all!), so I have to take a break and read an actual book.

(a few days later) Eventually, the Nook starting behaving again, so I was able to finish the book. It’s an intriguing idea: an expert conservator of medieval books and manuscripts (Australian Dr. Hanna Heath) examines the  500-year-old Sarajevo Haggadah which has turned up after being lost for many years. As the war in Bosnia is ending, Hanna travels to Sarajevo to examine and restore the ancient codex, which is unusual not only for its extreme age but also because it is lavishly illustrated–a rarity in Jewish manuscripts. She collects some tiny fragments (a bit of insect wing, a hair, a stain, some salt) and observes that there is a place for clasps, but no clasps), and sets off to consult several learned colleagues to try to figure out what they can tell her about where the book has been. They speculate, but they can never know how these things came to be in the book. However, Brooks can invent some plausible stories! Between the chapters describing Hanna’s work and life, we travel back in time as Brooks weaves fictional stories of how the artifacts got into the book. Our glimpses of the book’s history go farther and farther back in time, first to 20th century Sarajevo, then to 17th century Venice and finally 15th century Spain, where we meet the artist who created the illuminated illustrations.  It takes a novelist with poetic license to tell the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah.

Although parts of the book seem contrived, it is an enjoyable read and despite the fictionalization, an interesting journey into Jewish and European history.