by Emma Donoghue
Recommended by Corey Redekop
We think you’ll find Room both a delight and a challenge. Emma Donoghue’s clever narration has won the hearts of readers worldwide as a bestselling novel. Jack’s wonder and playfulness dilutes the confinement, and yet Donoghue does not shy away from realities of a life entrapped. Through her story of a mother and son, we are given a glimpse into the torturous conditions of life in solitary confinement, and the destruction it can wreck upon those within a tiny cell.
This month, explore the novel Room with guest author Corey Redekop, and read beyond the book to learn more about the impact of solitary confinement, and why it is considered a form of torture. Furthermore, you will find an action on page 10 of our Amnesty International Book Club discussion guide to help support Mohammad Ali Taheri, who is a prisoner of conscience in Iran and has remained in solitary confinement for over five years.
Room, from any angle, shouldn’t work as well as it does. Its narrative is laden with monstrous themes of sexual assault, kidnapping, forcible confinement, psychological torture, and others. It’s told from a point of view of Jack, a precocious and uncomprehending child. Half of its length is located within a suffocating nightmare.
By almost any metric, Emma Donoghue’s tale should be a well-nigh excruciating descent into a hellscape of voyeuristic despair, the stuff of lurid melodrama and mawkish Lifetime made-for-television movies.
Suffice to say, I approached my initial reading of it with a fair amount of dread, and I don’t mean to offer a backhanded compliment when I say I was utterly relieved I didn’t want to slash my wrists immediately after the last page. Room is a harrowing journey, oh yes, and terrifying, and claustrophobic, and soul-wrenching. This is as it should be. Room is also (let me find my other list) brave, funny, intelligent, rational, and triumphant …
Click below to download the discussion guide.
About Corey Redekop
Redekop’s debut novel, Shelf Monkey, won Best Popular Fiction Novel at the 2008 Independent Book Publishers Awards and was declared a “Top 40 Novel of the Decade” by CBC Canada Reads. His follow-up novel, Husk, was shortlisted for the 2013 ReLit Award and chosen as one of the top books of the year by editors of Amazon.ca. It was later released in a French translation (as Mister Funk) and as an audiobook. His short stories have appeared in anthologies such as The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir, Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond, Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen, and Those Who Make Us: Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories. Corey abides in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he is working on his third novel.
He can be found online at www.coreyredekop. ca and on Twitter at @coreyredekop.
About the Author
Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over: she spent eight years in Cambridge, United Kingdom, doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner and their two children. She also migrates between genres, writing literary history, biography and stage and radio plays, as well as fairy tales and short stories. She is best known for her novels, which range from the historical to the contemporary. Her international bestseller Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth and Orange prizes. The Lotterys Plus One is her first novel for young readers.
Find her online at emmadonoghue.com, on Facebook under Emma Donoghue, and on Twitter @EDonoghueWriter.
