Detailed plot synopsis reviews of Room |
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He especially loved sucking her left tit because that gave the best milk. Jack lifts Ma's shirt and kisses her breasts and says goodbye to them. Definitely something erotic going on there.
Jack wants to go back to the shed again for old times' sake. Ma is not enthusiastic but agrees. When Jack gets there he doesn't recognize it because all of their things have been removed.
The end.
Yes, the end. Were you expecting more? I know I was.
There was one exciting part of this story. Jack's escape. That was also, however, the most unbelievable part of the story, for reasons outlined earlier.
The rest of the book was lacking. The first 100 pages forced us to watch Jack go through his daily paces which in a 12 by 12 box in a very repetitive routine gets boring quite quickly. The escape part in the next 50 pages was exciting, if convoluted, but the part after the escape became as dull as the first 100 pages.
Click here to see the rest of this reviewThat's because Jack, while curious about Outside, didn't seem to have much problem coping with it. Nor did he seem to have much problem forming relationships with others, given that he spent his entire life with only one person.
What would have been a more dramatic way to tell the story than the one presented? Well, for starters Ma should have had a confrontation with Nick. That was totally missing. It could have come at trial, or she could have visited him in jail and taunted him, or she could have turned tables and imprisoned him in the shed. Any of these would have had great emotional impact but we were not privy to any such scenarios.
Another interesting idea would have had Ma become subject to "Stockholm Syndrome" and become sympathetic to her captor. Show her refusing to press charges against Nick and voluntarily returning to her shed because after 7 years that's become the life she's comfortable with. That would have been interesting to read about.
A third idea would have been to fast forward 10 years and show Jack and Ma having an incestuous relationship. It is heavily foreshadowed throughout the book. Show Jack boning Ma and then being discovered and have psychologists try to turn his dick to other endeavors.
Or maybe show Jack becoming attracted to other women and show Ma becoming a jealous psycho stalker and trying to get rid of every girl Jack wants to bone.
There were a lot of exciting possibilities of what could have been done after the escape, but none of them were done. It felt like the author didn't know what to write at that point so we have a fairly dull story of Jack eating french toast and riding swings. Yipee.
And finally the behavior of the characters were unrealistic. Nick didn't have to make a prison to have sex. He could have gone on Match.com or certainly Tinder. Ma's sending her 5 year old to fight her own battles instead of trying to realistically free herself was also bizarre.
The idea of the story--of a trapped person trying to escape and then showing how being trapped for years f'ed her up--was an interesting one, but simply not well executed.
