There is no practical of discussing this book without major spoilers. Consider yourself warned.There must be nothing more difficult for a writer than to write a novel in the perspective of someone who does not share his or her world perspective. Emma Donoghue attempts this in Room where she not only writes it in a five year old's perspective but in the mind of someone who lives his five years in one room with no real idea of the outside world except that which his mother allows. The rest of the plot is well known and you can get it from the Goodreads synopsis. The author does a good job with this challenge for the first half of the book. Jack sees the world through his young mind and doesn't understand the horrific events that surround his life and his mother's life. Donoghue does a marvelous job at this. However the second half of the novel brings its own problems. Now that Jack and his mother escapes, he doesn't understand very much and we want more. The vocabulary that the author makes for Jack isn't enough. It's a tricky corner the author paints herself into. Perhaps the author wants us to see the story only through his eyes but when his mother attempts suicide we are left with not enough information to pull us in emotionally. We do not understand it and the act becomes selfish rather than poignant. I doubt this was the feeling that the author intended. I would have preferred the story to have more than one perspective, so I could feel a bit more empathy with others beside Jack. As I said, maybe this was the author's intention in looking at a tragic event through the eyes of a child but for me, I wanted more.
