"Room" by Emma Donoghue - gave me nightmares :(

[SheilaT]

4. I read it and liked it a lot.

***Spoiler Alert***



**






***






**



The first half, where they're still in the room, is extremely well done. But the second half, falls apart. Almost no one seems to behave in ways I think they would have behaved, not the woman, not her parents, not the kid. The core idea was so good, and so well executed in that first half, that it felt that the author had written herself into a corner, and tried to write back out, but didn't do it so well.

As someone who tries to write myself, I know how difficult it can be to write a short story well enough to be publishable, and an entire novel must be several orders of magnitude more difficult. But in this book, the entire second half was, for me, entirely unsatisfying.