The Wonder (Emma Donoghue)

If you’re author Emma Donoghue, it’s probably next to impossible to top your masterpiece Room.  Not only is it well written and unbelievably popular (it was even made into an award-winning movie), but once it was published, the reader really hadn’t seen anything like it before.  However, The Wonder, her latest, comes very close to Room in its uniqueness and psychological suspense.

Lib Wright, an English nurse, is brought to an Irish village to observe a little girl named Anna. It is said that Anna hadn’t taken any food since her Confirmation, living instead from “manna from heaven.”  Both the local priest and Anna’s doctor want her watched 24/7 to make sure that this is in fact a miracle and that she isn't getting food slipped to her in any way.  Lib starts off firm and no nonsense with Anna, determined to find out what is really going on.  But when it becomes a matter of life and death, Lib fights with all her might for the little girl she comes to love.

Donoghue’s gift is that she can take an extremely tense situation and infuse it with love and warmth.  That’s what she did in Room and what she eventually does in The Wonder.  You’ll wait with bated breath to see if Lib can save young Anna.

MY RATING - 4

Room (Emma Donoghue)

Wow…I haven’t read a more powerful book than Emma Donoghue’s Room in a very long time.  While it has an extremely disturbing (and sadly, true-to-life) premise, Room also brings out the sweetness and innocence of a child in a way that is truly remarkable.

The narrator of the story is Jack, who proudly just turned five years old.  He’s been living with his Ma (we never learn her first name) in a small room since he’s been born, held captive by a man they call Old Nick.  Since Jack doesn’t have any friends to call his own, he makes the items of the room his friends…Sink, Meltedy Spoon, Eggsnake (a long train of eggshells), and Plant.  Now that Jack is older, Ma tells him that there is an “Outside” he never knew, and they make plans for a grueling-on-the-reader escape.  Split into five sections with two distinct parts, Room is the most unique book to come along in some time.

Room’s writing is extraordinary and extremely original.  Making Jack the narrator, who doesn’t know anything about “Outside”, makes the novel less disturbing to the reader.  Some reviewers have found Donoghue's writing in Jack's voice “annoying”, specifically with the use of multiple proper nouns.  However, my thoughts are that it had to be this way.  Donoghue imbues innocence onto Jack and in so doing, inspires the reader to want to get him and his Ma out of that room in any way possible. 

Read through the many pages of gushing blurbs in the front of the novel.  Every one is true.  Room is highly original and both heartbreaking and inspiring at different times. 

MY RATING - 5