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What I Read
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RE: The discussion of Room (the winning book for December)
This post was last modified: 24 Feb 2011 10:47 PM by daisyduck1976. 
I'm very late to this, sorry. Despite downloading in September, I have only just read this today. Read it in a 5 hour stint with a short break for lunch, because I just couldn't put it down.
I would recommend it to anyone. I thought it was fantastic. However, I can see why some people wouldn't warm to it.
Having Jack as the narrator is something of a controversial move and some of the inconsistencies in his language that have been picked up, are indeed there. It all depends on how you view it, I think. I'm a primary school teacher, so I get see a lot of children developing their spoken language. I will say that Jack's language is not normal for a 5 year old BUT he isn't in normal circumstances, is he? Children pick up all of their language from those around them and he had an example group of... one person plus some tv. His mother did correct his spoken language, but what we were reading more often than not were his thoughts. Children will use as little language as possible in many cases, especially boys. Example from my class (6-7 year olds) "Change?" holding his book out to me. "In a sentence, please." "Can you change my reading book, please." Not that they can't do it, they just choose not to sometimes, especially when under stress of some kind, as Jack was in the immediate aftermath of PLan B. However, I agree that the game of Parrot was extremely unrealistic- I doubt any child in my class could do it. His language got a lot more complex than it realistically would have in the last two thirds of the book but I just didn't care. The story was too compelling.
I thought using Jack as the narrator has some merits. As he understood little of what he saw and heard, it kept everything very matter-of-fact. If the mother had been narrating, for example, the horror of it all would have been too much, I think, for me certainly.
I found the charcters extremely well-written from the main two all the eway through to the very minor ones. I was suitably frustrated by Jack's grandma, as I think I was meant to be? I cried, perhaps 4 times briefly and then had a huge rush of emotion at the end. I thought the closing scenes were very compelling and well-handled. Emma Donoghue managed to stay away from being sensationalist or overly sentimental, a huge plus in my opinion.
I loved it!
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Kaska- the line that you didn't understand- " We get into bed to warm up. Ma pulls up all her clothes & i have lots, the left then the right"
Whenever Jack referred to "having", he meant breastfeeding and when he referred to left and right, he meant his mother's breasts.
And when he says "Is the you, me?" It's because all his life, he has been the only you apart from Ma. Now he is unsure when people say you- whether they mean him or someone else.
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