Daring to go against the wildly enthusiastic critical acclaim of this novel, may I, as an English/Literature Major and teacher, offer the opinion that the book, Room (the story of a five-year-old boy and his mother held against her will by her abductor/rapist for many years …more and told from the boy's point of view), is a huge disappointment: poorly written (how much can we stand of a 5-year-old's narrative prose?); rhetorically unimaginative; bruisingly graphic; wholly predictible; and weakest where it should be strongest – in the complexities of the child's adjustment to a strange new world Outside, and the severance of a unique but grotesque bond between mother and child. This book has none of the usual earmarks of a Booker-Mann novel and, I suspect, is regarded highly, in part, because of the public's reluctance to criticize the use of the subject matter. (less)