Chapter Thirteen: Room

Although I was a bit nervous about reading a book that promised to include some fairly dark content (it's about a woman who has been kidnapped, kept in captivity for years, and is trying to raise her son in the small room where they're kept), I found myself really gripped by this novel by Emma Donoghue.  It was hard to put down!  I think a big part of why I found it so absorbing and readable was that Donoghue narrates in the voice of the five-year-old child who has been born and raised in this room: this choice of narration allows a lot of the heaviest information to be filtered, in the sense that the experience of captivity, which seems absolutely atrocious to readers used to living outside of captivity, just seems normal to the narrator, so while his accounts of his mother allowed me to glimpse the horror of the situation, I didn't feel the horror pressing directly on me as I read.  Still, it was a bit of a heavy read, but I liked it a lot.