Room

  

Room by Emma Donahue is about this woman who was kidnapped 7 years prior and kept in a one room shed in the back of the home of her abductor, whom is referred to as Old Nick. The book begins with the 5th birthday of her son Jack who is the product of Old Nick's almost nightly raping. The woman tries her best to make this a happy birthday for him despite the fact that they are trapped in this one room. This has all the making of a sad and depressing story, similar to the true story of Jaycee Dugard, but here is where Donahue spins things. The entire novel is told through the eyes of 5 year old Jack.

The change in perspective is what makes this story so wonderful. Even though the story is told from the point of view of a 5 year old, it is not meant for a 5 year old to read.While Jack speaks of normal, light, childhood things such as Dora, books, and games, he also describes darker, more adult subjects, such as the visits from Old Nick and the days when Ma is "gone" and remains in bed all day. However, in describing darker things, Jack describes it like it's normal, because this is all he's ever known in his 5 short years. Anything beyond that small room in which they are confined, which Jack refers to as outer space, is unreal and scary for Jack. All the while, we the reader, can see the true gravity of the situation and just how small Jack and Ma's world is in that shed.

Although this story is told through the eyes of Jack, we still get a glimpse of Ma's feelings. While Jack is happy just being in a small room with his Ma, Ma feels like a prisoner and yearns for the outside world she knew before she held captive. She knows, as we the readers know, that this small room cannot hold her and Jack forever. She tries her very best despite the bleak situation to keep Jack healthy, happy, well educated, and constantly entertained. This is definitely not an easy feat as many parents know, particularly keeping young children entertained. However, Ma tries her best and does an amazing job of coming up with fun and creative things for Jack to do despite their very limited resources (i.e., race track around the bed for exercise, egg shells threaded together to make a snake). Ma also finds unique ways to keep Jack safe. Even though Old Nick is essentially Jack's father, Jack has never gotten to know him or vice versa. Before Old Nick visits, Ma hides Jack in a wardrobe, which seems rather cruel on the surface. But in reality, this is yet another way Ma protects Jack. She doesn't want Jack to be exposed to the likes of Old Nick and his abuse; she'd rather lock him away because at least that way she is sure that he is safe.

This book we very well put together and beautifully written. There is enough action and suspense to keep you guessing. I found Jack's point of view of the world to be at many times fun and imaginative. It really reminds you of how small the world can be to a young child and how important exposure to the outside world is for children.  There are instances where we are left wishing that we could hear Ma's thoughts, but ultimately I found hearing the story through Jack's eyes to be so much lighter and at times comical that I found myself not missing Ma's point of view.

How to be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway

Summary
How to Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway is story about culture, tradition, family strife, and mothers and daughter. Shoko is a Japanese woman who marries an American GI after WWII and moves to America. Her father agrees with the union as he feels it is the best way for Shoko to get a better life. However, her younger brother, fueled with anger at the Japanese losing the war and the resulting American occupation, feels Shoko has shamed her family and her country. For decades the two do not speak. When a much older Shoko falls ill and feels her life is about to end, she is eager to visit Japan one last time to find her brother. When it's apparent that she is too ill to make the trip herself, she asks her daughter, Sue, a divorced mother and the object of much criticism from Shoko, to make the trip and find her brother for her.This trip brings to light a long family secret that effects the family in various ways.

My Review
I found this book to be an enriching and quick read. The book is split between the points of view of Shoko and Sue, which I feel is the best way to write this novel because it allows us to get the full story. Typical mother-daughter conflicts exist between Shoko and Sue that cross over many cultural boundaries. Shoko has very high hopes and standards for Sue, but because of her upbringing she has difficulty expressing her true feelings, that of love and overall pride, towards her daughter. Sue feels she is nothing but a great disappointment to her mother due to Shoko's constant criticism. Sue believes that no matter what she does, she will never live up to her mother's expectations and will therefore never be able to please Shoko. Thus, Sue is often indifferent, defiant, and rebellious. What makes these conflicts even more difficult are cultural clashes as well as generation clashes. Sue was not allowed to read teen magazines, wear jeans, or interact with boys like other American girls because, according to Shoko and her husband, these were not things a proper Japanese-American girls should do. The result was a daughter so naive and desperate for freedom that she married the first boy she kissed, had a daughter at a young age and ended up divorced.

What sort of disappointed me about this book is that the title is a bit misleading. Even though each chapter begins with an excerpt from a book called How to be an American Housewife, which Shoko's husband gave to Shoko in order to make her transition into American life easier, the novel doesn't really go into Shoko's adaptation into life as an American housewife. Dilloway does express how difficult it was for Shoko to learn the language and to make friends with the other American housewives and the effect it had on her children. That is important and Dilloway does it quite well.  There are only a few instances, however, where we experience Shoko's life as an American housewife: the times where Shoko refused help from her mother-in-law with housework during visits due to Japanese customs and when Shoko learned how to make American spaghetti and meatballs. In fact, without the excerpts at the beginning of each chapter, we don't really see a lot of the cultural differences between the Japanese housewife and the American housewife and what Japanese women have to learn (or unlearn) to be a proper American housewife. I think if Dilloway had spent a little extra time going into that, it would've made this novel even more powerful. As the novel stands, I do recommend it to those, like me, who are fascinated by Asian culture and like strong female protagonists.

Classic Mashups

I attended my third Comic Con today and book publishers such as Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Random House had booths there. It was there that I made a interesting discovery....Classic mashups. For those of you who were like me and were completely unaware that such a thing existed, it's basically authors taking classic novels from authors like Kafka, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Louis May Alcott, etc, and giving it a different spin. Most of them are horror based with Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves and Sea Serpents. But there are somewhat lighter ones like The Meowmorphosis which takes Kafka's classic Metomorphosis  and has the main character turn into a man size kitten rather than a cockroach. The first one that caught my eye was at the S&S booth called Jane Slayre written by Sherri Browning Erwin . This book particularly took my interest because I remember having to read Jane Eyre  in high school and completely loathing it (and I was not exactly one of those students who hated every book I was assigned just because it was an assignment). I actually recall a college English professor raving about it in class, getting completely nauseated and openly expressing my total dislike of the book. In Jane Slayre, judging by the blurb and what I've read on Amazon.com, turns the classic Reed family into vampires and Jane's classmates into Zombies all the while keeping the heroin Jane pretty much the same. From what I've read about other books in this seemingly growing genre such as Wuthering Bites  and Little Vampire Women  such minor changes remain a constant. In reading a excerpt from Jane Slayre, the text itself seems to remain ultimately the same, except that instead of using words like "dinner" and "dining"  Erwin uses words like "prey" and "hunting". Many fans of these classics may find this be blasphemous and a ploy to make money off of the vampire/werewolf/zombie fad. Others may be intreguiged to read a lighter comedic spin on the classics. One thing is for certain, horror and scifi fans who deem such classics as out of date and boring will most likely find these books to be a fun mix. I've personally ordered Jane Slayre, Little Vampire Women and Wuthering Bites. I will definitely be blogging my findings once I read them.