Room - Emma Donoghue

The sleeve notes of this book include a quote from Audrey Niffenegger saying 'is a book to read in one sitting' - how right she is! I couldn't afford the time to read it in one sitting, but I did read it in two days, and found it very hard to put it down.

I guess the main thing that kept me hooked was the narrative, the story is told by Jack, a five year old who, with his mother is kept captive in Room. 'Ma' was abducted by 'Old Nick' as a teenager, and later gives birth to Jack.

All Jack knows is the world inside Room, but just after his fifth birthday 'Ma' admits that what he sees on the TV is real, and that they have to escape.

I couldn't stop reading, the early part of the book deals with Jack's descriptions of life in Room, followed by their escape and subsequent re-establishment into society.

If I have one criticism it is that the escape was too easy, and fast; but that does not detract from the novel or my enjoyment. The fact that its loosely based on the Josef Fritzl case in Austria, meant little to me as I didn't follow the case, but having now read about it on the web I can see the similarities.

This book is compelling, read it.

January 2011

Bought in Waterstones.

Miss Smilla's feeling for snow - Peter Hoeg

My Dad read and enjoyed this book back in the mid 90s, I know this because not only did he lend me his copy (which I still have), but because the book mark he used is still inside printed with a competition with the closing date of 1995.

Knowing that I had enjoyed reading thrillers before, he had recommended this, but I never could 'get into it'. It's sat on various bookshelves ever since.

The current fashionability of Scandinavian crime fiction made me go looking for this book, the first to come to the UK and be successful.

Although I did finish it this time, it's taken a while and I'm still not convinced it lived up to all the hype. But it did keep me reading nonetheless.

I've always had a problem following story lines in which I'm unable to pronounce the names of the characters, I find myself skim reading the names and then can't work out what is going on. This certainly happened at points, as well as getting a bit lost in the plot half way through.

The story starts with the death of a young boy who lived next door to Miss Smilla, a death that the police believe is an accident, but which due to her feeling for snow, Miss Smilla knows was something more.

By the end of the book Smilla is running around on a ship in the Arctic, trying to work out where it is going and fighting with baddies!

I'm at a loss to see why the book won a crime novel literary prize, it's not so much a crime novel, as the story of a woman who is bored with life and has lost her way. The descriptions of the different types of snow and ice start off interesting, but after a while become almost overwhelming. The reasons and circumstances of the boys death become lost and irrelevant so that by the end I no longer cared. In fact I found the end to be rather abrupt and very unsatisfying - like Hoeg couldn't work out or decide where to go next, so just stopped.

Lent by (and subsequently inherited from) my father.

Mid December 2010 - 16 Jan 2011