Room, by Emma Donoghue

Best-selling, award-winning novel and motion picture, nominated for four Academy Awards

Room is a good story from start to finish.  But what makes it so effective and so captivating is that it is told in its entirely by one of its main characters, Jack, in his five-year-old voice.

Jack has lived his entire life in an 11×11 foot, windowless room.  He was born there.  He and his “Ma” eat, sleep, play and live there, intentionally hidden from the outside world.  At night Ma shuts Jack into the wardrobe, safe and hopefully asleep when “Old Nick” chooses to visit.

But while “Room” is home to Jack, to Ma it is the prison where she has been held captive for seven years, since she was kidnapped when she was 19.  She is repeatedly raped by Old Nick who enters Room any night he pleases. Jack is the result of one of those rapes.

Jack’s observations are bright, often insightful and reflect the good education his mother has managed to give him despite very limited tools. She teaches him to read, to think and to question. She makes up creative games to increase his vocabulary and give him a love for books, hoping to prepare him somewhat for the outside world. Together they create “word sandwiches”—if something is both cool and scary is is “coolary.” Jack’s observations when he finally is able to see the outside world through a window are all his own. He calls the sun “God’s face.”

While Ma is depressed and fiercely determined to escape, she is loves her young son and creates the best life and most loving environment she can for him.

But Jack’s curiosity and her own desperation are building and she knows she must find a way for them to escape from Room. They make a harrowing escape into the “Outside.”But now they must make huge and very different adjustments—Jack into a world full of people, sunshine, wind, buildings, cars and loud unfamiliar sounds everywhere.  And Ma now finds herself in a familiar but very changed world. While her family and friends hoped and prayed she was still alive they could have had no idea what her life had become: motherhood, repeated rapes, imprisonment in a small room with no windows, completely cut off from the outside world.

Ma and Jack are frightened, but of different things and for different reasons. We watch them both in their separate struggles, hear Jack describe his new world, his fear, awe, and his worry about his Ma and her own very different struggle to adjust.

The continuing thread is the unconquerable love and determination Jack and his Ma share—the diamond-hard love between a mother and her child.

— Gail Stilwill

Awakenings, Oliver Sacks

Once when I was working in the garden, a bee plummeted out of the blue and dove into the heart of a hollyhock and stayed in there a long time, maintaining a little motion and humming, gorging. Eventually, he crawled out, sat a spell, and lifted off heavily. He literally couldn’t fly straight. After a couple of lazy loops and bemused U-turns he disappeared over the hedge.

That’s a fair description of what can happen to readers of Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings, a book about the catatonic, post-encephalitic patients Dr. Sacks treated at Mt. Carmel hospital when he went there as a young neurologist in 1966. We readers dive in because both author and book are so widely acclaimed (ten other well-received books and countless articles and lectures from Sacks; a movie and various stage plays from the book.)

Like the bee, we find lots to feed on: several prefaces and forewords as the book has gone through different editions. A twenty-five-page prologue. And then the heart: The compelling stories of twenty patients who awoke from their long sleep (brought on by encephalitis) after being administered L-Dopa (one of the very early psychotropic meds). In this section, there are surely as many lines of footnotes as of body. And they aren’t necessarily boring footnotes that the reader wants to skip.

Then there is a forty-page riff, in a section called Perspectives, on how illness fits into Western culture, history, philosophy, and literature. And a thirty-five-page epilogue to the 1982 edition and a brief postscript to the 1990 edition. Plus eighty pages of appendices (an interesting series of essays/papers that has an “Oh, and everything else interesting on the subject . . .” feel to it). Followed by a glossary (useful for medical terms), a bibliography, and an index.

In the middle of the book is an inset of haunting photographs of Mt. Carmel patients caught in catatonic sleep and their poignant awakenings. There are also clips from the media: Sleepy Sickness Spreading: Fatal Cases: Hunt for Elusive Germ: 20,000 Cases Last Year: Epidemic Worst In Britain and Italy: Record Death Toll.

That’s why the reader comes out sated. A little over-fed. Stunned. Sacks was (he died this year) a brilliant neurologist and a deeply compassionate physician. He had the imagination and audacity to experiment with new chemistry and awaken catatonic patients; he had the sorrow of watching them eventually regress and suffer and die.

Perhaps one reason Sacks has been so embraced as a person, physician, and writer is that he felt the humanity of illness. In the section called Perspectives, he writes “Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world’s character: character is monadic or microcosmic, worlds within worlds within worlds, worlds which express worlds. The disease-the man-the world go together and cannot be considered separately as things-in-themselves.”

In our current specialized, assembly line, code-for-payment medical industrial complex, who can help but feel nostalgia for that humanity?  

— Sharelle Moranville

 

A Thief of Time, by Tony Hillerman

Tony Hillerman creates a sense of place so strong and compelling you forget this is a mystery and just get caught up in the land, its people, and its history. More mystical than mystery, A Thief of Time is named for the criminals who steal Native American artifacts—in this case, Anasazi and Navajo pots—and sell them for exorbitant amounts. Those people, according to Navajo culture, are stealing their ancestors’ history.

In the book, an anthropologist who has found a treasure trove of artifacts disappears, and the Navajo Tribal Police are charged with finding her. It’s a compelling story, largely because of the cast of full-bodied characters, including two tribal policemen, several anthropologists, a random assortment of petty thieves, an influential Mormon leader with a sad secret, a New York museum curator, and a wealthy Manhattan pot collector.

Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn leads the search; this theoretically is one of his last cases, having given his notice of resignation after his beloved wife Emma died. The young Jim Chee joins him, trying to balance his police work with his unsuccessful attempts to become a Navajo shaman. Both are beautifully crafted characters whose frustration with one another is matched with a common love for their religion and traditions.

As well-woven as a Navajo rug, the story centers on the remarkable Chaco Canyon and the surrounding area of New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. It won the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel (1989) and was a nominee for the Anthony Award for Best Novel (1989) and the Edgar Award for Best Novel (1989).

It’s the eighth of 18 books Hillerman created featuring Leaphorn and Chee. His daughter Anne completed an additional two. PBS produced TV movies of three of them—A Thief of Time, Skinwalkers, and Coyote Flats—that are available through PBS or on Netflix.

—Pat Prijatel