Room

Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue is one psychological train wreck of a book. I almost gave up on it a quarter of the way through because of the awkward, disjointed syntax supposedly representing the speech and thought patterns of the five-year-old boy who narrates the story.

Reading the first half of this book (on my friend Connie's nook), I felt like a voyeur —like it was wrong for me to bear witness to the everyday occurrences being described by the innocent boy. After all, the heroine and her son are being held hostage in an old shed by a psychopath known only as Old Nick.

Maybe I shouldn't have watched the five-part documentary on YouTube about the miserable-excuse-for-a-human-being upon whose true-life story the book's plot is based. Just knowing that such a scenario actually took place definitely added to the 'ick-factor' for me. If you can stand it, you can read about the Josef Fritzl case here.