Room is the place where 5-year-old Jack was born and grows up along with his mother. This space is his reality. Everything outside of it is television (not real!).

Inside Room, Jack and Ma sleep and wake up, eat and drink, read and get exercise, learn and play. Room is the center of their world, is were love, laughter, life and fear is. For there is night time, when Ma hides Jack in the closet, to keep him safe from Old Nick.

Old Nick is what exactly the name reads – a devil. He keeps Ma prisoned in the Room, away from her family and friends, away from the world, with very little to go by for her and her son, and a Sunday present every week. Ma is not in the Room on her will, which is something that Jack learns once he gets 5, when Ma decides to share the truth with Jack and asks him to be the brave boy she always knew he is.

This is the story of a captive woman and her son, in a 12 foot square room, narrated by the little boy, whose only experience of life is that of the Room, a four channel TV and his mother’s stories. This is a one-time-experience-reading as the author successfully gets into the boys mind and produces a very interesting, though humorous and terrifying story of how the boy understands the world. In the beginning, the world is the room. Everything else just isn’t. This is not easily comprehended be people that have lived free since birth. Day by day, his whole world falls apart as his mother starts telling him of a different truth, a different world, a different regime. There is the world as shown on TV, or so, where people live free, where is no Old Nick to haunt their lives, where they have  access to fresh veggies and meat and all that stuff they have to ask for every single day. This info is all too much for his little head, yet again, for the love of his mother he becomes the brave boy that gets them free. And so the adventure begins…

There are only few emotions one can go through by reading this book. There is life as we never want to see it and there is life as we are experiencing it and things we take for granted. It is so well written that it can scare you to death. The author’s tinny attention to detail, as Jack describes his safety nest can draw a horrifying picture of the untold place. As one reads, one realizes that human imagination can go beyond boundaries when nature calls, for what the woman created as a perfect universe to keep her child safe and happy, requires much courage as is.

Wishful thinking, the Room is not a real place…