Parable of the Peanut Butter

Consider for a moment that you are a big fan of peanut butter. You are more than a fan, you are a connoisseur of peanut butter who can explain the merits of both crunchy and creamy varieties without bias, and you know the answer to the age-old spreading question: spoon or knife (but you're not telling).

You've tried peanut butters far and wide, and you know quality. For some foods, the generic store brand might taste just as well as their name-brand counterparts, but not peanut butter. With peanut butter, you have to suck it up and go with the good stuff.

You're perusing the grocery store shelves one day to find that last jar of honey-roasted Peter Pan amongst all the Jiffs and Skippys (Skippies?), when your eye falls on one jar in back. It is glass, not plastic, and you know that label. This is not your regular store-brand peanut butter. This is imported, superbly creamy, impossibly delicious, and--whoa. Expensive. Very.

You can't pass it up. You are a peanut butter connoisseur, remember? This is the kind of peanut butter you've been looking for. You're buying it, even if it means you have to put back your copies of Writer's Digest and the National Enquirer. There's only this one jar, and you're not likely to find this stuff again. You tuck the jar in safe next to your bananas and eggs and head for the register. You cock a disdainful eyebrow toward the jelly as you pass. No way, jelly. Not this time. This peanut butter doesn't need your help. It is special. 

You get home and pull out a slice of Wonderbread for your ultimate sandwich. You look at it on the plate, so plain, so white, so boring. This peanut butter can do better than this. It doesn't need any plastic-bag loaf training-wheels bread. You pull out a giant baguette and slice it open. You've broken out the good bread and that means you're putting a lot of pressure on this peanut butter to be able to turn your expensive baguette into the biggest, best peanut butter sandwich you've ever seen, that anyone has ever seen.  You open the jar of peanut butter and take a whiff. Your mouth waters. In goes a spoon and you taste it.

Wow.

You weren't wrong.  This peanut butter is the real deal. This peanut butter actually wants to make you happy; you can feel it in all your taste buds.

You set to work spreading the peanut butter on the baguette. At first, you put down thick creamy blobs. It spreads so well, so smoothly. It is certainly well-behaved; it would spread just as well with a spoon or a knife. The bread is coarse and bigger than it looked at first, and now that you're noticing it, there isn't as much peanut butter in the jar as you thought. As you push the peanut butter over the surface, you realize you have to rethink your peanut butter sandwich making strategy. This is no chintzy white-bread peanut butter sandwich, this is an epic mega-sandwich! You are determined you will succeed, so you push and push the peanut butter, spread, spread, spread until you have a thin layer over the entire baguette. Very thin. You scrape the bottom of the little glass jar one last time for good measure and then...it is time. You take a bite.

It's...okay.

It's...bready.

It's...bread. Mostly.

Where's the taste? You think back to the way the peanut butter first hit your tongue straight out of the jar: strong, fresh, smooth, plentiful. Where has that magic gone? Where has the freakin' peanut butter gone?

You open the sandwich and have a look at the pitiful smearings of your expensive PB-no-J hanging on to the surface of the bread. It's there. It's all there, but it's not enough. The bread is too big, the jar too small. There is more to a dish than the presence of right ingredients, and there just isn't enough peanut butter to turn this bread into a sandwich no matter how far you've spread it, because there's not enough of it to be what it is supposed to be.

You scrape your knife over the bread, trying to reclaim some so you can have half an epic sandwich at least, but it's no use. You really smeared that peanut butter in there. It's smashed down into the bread, an irretrievable done deal. You go back to the jar, but there it sits: empty, only a few sad daubs clinging to the glass. There is no more. There will be no more.

You have your sandwich all right, but your ingredients are wasted just the same.

So, tell me. Where are you wasting your peanut butter?

Tools of the Trade: Ink Review - Noodler's Firefly

There are a lot of reasons to pick up a pen. Most of them involve writing something down (and some of them involve poking at the space behind your desk to scoot out that quarter you dropped). Once the writing is done, there's usually cause to read it back. To study it, maybe to edit it. For me, that's where Noodler's Firefly comes in.

I used to get along fine with a handful of felt-tip highlighters for most of my studying and editing. (By the way, have you ever noticed how highlighters tend to just multiply in drawers? I do NOT remember buying so many, but I have lots. Maybe I need to sit them closer to my spare change jar so they can teach it some tricks.)

There is nothing wrong with a good felt-tip highlighter. They get the job done, they're cheap, they're easy to obtain. They're simple tools. They're just not as much fun as they could be.

I got this ink because Lamy decided to release this pen as it's 2013 Limited Edition Safari:

Neon Yellow Lamy Safari. It's more neon than it looks.

When I saw that pen, I saw instant potential for an excuse to a) get a cool new pen and b) find a way to replace yet another common writing tool with a fountain pen.

I ordered my Neon Yellow Safari with a 1.9mm italic nib. An italic nib is one with no ball of tipping material on the end of the nib, usually cut straight across (or sometimes at an angle, called an oblique) and used to provide essential line variation for calligraphic writing. Or, in this case highlighting.

1.9mm is a wide nib, too wide for most casual writing, even if you're accomplished in penmanship. For my purposes, it was perfect.

I went in search of the highlighter ink that would most match my fluorescent yellow pen, and Noodler's Firefly was top of the line. Noodler's and a few other manufacturers make other highlighter inks in various colors, but as soon as I loaded Firefly in my Safari, I knew I had chosen well. It is such a perfect match for that bright, eye-searing yellow I am so well-trained to spot when scanning documents, and it showed up flawlessly on all the text I tried it with.

I was hoping that the fountain pen highlighting method would produce less smearing and ink-transfer when highlighting over handwritten (or ink-jet printed) words than felt-tip highlighters. Sadly, it was not to be. Highlighting over fountain pen ink is especially bad about this, but I noticed it happening with commercial ballpoints and rollerballs as well. Even though this is just as common with standard highlighters, this is a fountain pen which uses capillary action to produce ink-flow, and which can also suck up ink small amounts of pooled ink as it writes. That left the pen writing with a lingering black muddy quality for longer than it would take to de-smudge a felt-tip with a few scribbles.

Another concern is the water resistance. Be warned: if you are using this ink on an important document, keep it away from water! This is one of the most water-soluble inks I have ever used. It literally ceases to exist when it comes in contact with H2O. It is entirely erasable, and that's not a good thing in this case. 

The other issue I experienced was with the pen, not the ink. The 1.9mm nib I received had very tight tines and required some tweaking to get it to flow well. Even once that was done, I noticed that I had trouble keeping the nib flat on the paper, sometimes losing contact and producing a skip. The ink is thin and not very viscous, so it didn't help me out with maintaining flow like some thicker inks will. I also found it to be kind of scratchy and not as pleasant to use as I'd hoped. Part of the problem is with me--I am a left-handed underwriter, and while it doesn't affect my ability to use most pens, I have always struggled with italic nibs of all sizes. I do much better with an oblique that follows the natural contour of my grip and enables me to keep the nib connected to the paper in a more natural way.

This set-up took some getting used to, but I am very happy with the ink. It works great on laser printed and commercially printed pages. I may purchase a Platinum Preppy Highlighter pen in the near future. All Platinum Preppies are easily convertible to eyedropper fillers, meaning you can seal the threads and fill the whole barrel with ink. That would give me a felt-tip alternative to use with this ink, and I guarantee it will be more economical in the long run than going through piles of standard highlighters.

As with some other bright inks, this one proved difficult to scan. My scanner is designed to AVOID picking up highlighted sections, so I had to take a photo instead. It doesn't capture the fluorescence very well, but it is there, just as bright and useful as the drawerful of Sharpie highlighters apparently everyone has.

Of course, if you get a bottle of this ink and it doesn't fit your needs, you could always do what I suggested in the review: smear it all over your hands and go outside at dusk to strike fear in the heart of every firefly for miles.

The comparison is a Sharpie highlighter. When a highlighter is doing its job, it isn't supposed to be legible, right?

Inspiration Monday: From Observer to Narrator

I'm currently reading On the Road by Jack Keroac. While it is billed as a novel, Keroac made no secret about the fact that it was built from his own experiences. The narrative rumbles on and on in stream of consciousness like a jazzy drum solo, complete with unexpected adjectives that ring in your ears like cymbal crashes. Every interaction the narrator has with another person is colorful and alive, not because of the amount of details provided--on the contrary, he blazes from one place to the next like a shooting star in Mexican huarache shoes--but because of the ones he chooses to include. This is a gift Keroac had, for sure, but another reason he was able to capture so much noise and turn it into music was that he was purposeful about it. As a writer, Keroac did not just observe. He observed with intent.

Through years of writing fiction, especially those projects with a dash of fantasy, I have become well-practiced in observing entire worlds unfolding only in my head. How a person talks or drives a car or folds his pillow under his head comes from the jumbled trunk of collected experiences stored in the attic of my mind. There are all kinds of odds and ends in there--little bits of conversations, half-remembered sensory experiences, a few scars, and probably a good amount of Jell-O.

I didn't store all those things in the back of my mind with the plan of someday channeling them into a story, a blog post, or even to color the way I see things when I read books. They are largely just things that somehow stuck with me for better or worse, unimpeachably stamped with my perception and voice, that find their way out of the box when the time comes. These things can be useful, but they aren't intentional. 

I recently tried a little experiment. During a conversation with Husband, I grabbed up a notebook and I narrated him. He wasn't sure what I was doing at first, but I read what I had written back to him afterward. He not as amused as I was, but he was a good sport (because as sports go, he is the very best good one). I noticed a few interesting things. There is a cadence to his speech and a little dip in his accent that is all his own. I must have known; we've been married for years. I would recognize his voice anywhere, but I still hadn't noticed. He didn't talk like I write, he talked like he talks. Instead of remembering him on paper, I captured him.

Try it out this week. Don't just listen to the world around you, listen with intent. Write things down the way they are, not the way you remember them. Put on your journalist's hat and tell it like it is. Not only is it good practice for developing varied character voices, it is a great way to stockpile images, dialogue, and scenes that could come in handy later. Pay attention to the nuance. Give yourself a chance to really notice things. It'll become second nature, and you'll find yourself remembering things in a new, purposeful way.

It is one thing to go through life as an unexamined observer, but once you become a narrator you take on the responsibility of opening your readers' eyes to the way you see things, and underneath, why you see them that way.

Your life story is happening now. Tell it.

Point in Time

There are a lot of things I love about my job working with people who have experienced homelessness.

For one, I get a front-row seat to some of the greatest personal comeback stories anyone could ask for. I've seen people rescue themselves from human trafficking, unconscionable violence, dehumanizing addictions, and textbook-defying mental and physical illness. These same people get jobs, they go back to school, they get medical and psychiatric care, they learn how to read, they make friends. They go from streets, shelters, abandoned buildings, and sheet-and-tarp tents, to sleeping in beds (really sleeping, which many haven't done for years), washing their clothes, grocery shopping, and paying bills. These are all things most of us take for granted, but for my clients these are milestones. Not everyone has the kind of success they write about in human-interest newspaper stories, but most are on the road to seeing themselves as individuals again, remembering what it is like to have the privilege of being a "person" instead of being branded: HOMELESS.

My job is never, ever, ever, ever boring, and it allows me to see up close and personal the one really true magic trick a human being can perform:

Transformation.

It's beautiful. Completely. Every single time.

Today's adventure was the nationwide Homeless Point-in-Time Count. This initiative is mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to gain a census of the sheltered and unsheltered homeless populations around the country's major cities on one given day, strategically chosen as the day after the estimated coldest night of the year. Service providers and volunteers are dispatched into the city to locate and interview unsheltered individuals.

The Point-in-Time Count is the only opportunity some of us ever take to spend a day taking stock of our city. This is a day spent looking around corners, behind things, under things, peeking through the looking-glass to the places our cities don't want us to notice, the places where invisible things like to hide. Invisible people.

Today, my coworker and I were assigned an area of the city we don't normally frequent. It's kind of funny, really, because this area is much nearer to my home than to my work, but it still felt foreign. We peeked behind parking lots, in alleys, around overpasses, and under bridges. My coworker, (who has a future in NASCAR if this career doesn't work out for her) pulled several EXPERT U-turns on seven lane highways to get us near enough to approach people. We met some interesting people today, ones I won't forget. It's hard to believe they have been there all this time, practically in my own backyard.

I work with people who have experienced homelessness for a living, and days like today still have the power to open my eyes and remind me: homelessness is a crisis. It is a complicated, tangled-up, no-easy-answers problem, but that is no excuse to forget. It is an emergency for these individuals, day in and day out, through all points in their time whether we are counting or not. Their lives are happening in these hidden places we are trained not to see and their every activity is centered around survival, whatever shape it takes for that person. It is profoundly unjust, and when we forget this (or just refuse to look), we lose a piece of our humanity.

I'm going to endeavor to remember to peek around corners a little more often, and to remember the people who may be carving out an existence there: people who are sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, and hopefully someday--neighbors.

Tools of the Trade: Poopoopaper Panda Poo Journal

On a trip to the Memphis Zoo last year, I ducked into the gift shop with Husband and my friend. They meandered around, trying on safari hats and sunglasses, smugly ignoring all the snake memorabilia hiding on the shelves. I do not like snakes, remember? So, that left me creeping around the aisles, holding my breath and steeling myself so I could walk past the big display of plush snake stuffed animals (ages 3+). I was quickly becoming a nervous wreck and needed something to focus on so I could bide my time in safety.

My sixth sense kicked in and I finally located a panda-adorned table full of books, pens, and paper. There were no snakes anywhere near it, and no one else was standing there. Plus, PANDAS! Perfect.

The table was piled high with these:

They were made with panda poo.

Like, poo from actual pandas. Like this one, who posed so nicely for me:

He's making new raw paper material right now.

Naturally, I had to have one.

The manufacturer, Poopoopaper (their webstore is called the "Pootique"), uses the back cover to assure me that the poo in question was sifted for bamboo fibers, which were washed and sterilized before processing, ensuring an environmentally sound and odorless writing experience. Uh huh. Let's hope so.

There is good craftsmanship in this notebook. The cover is adorable. It is well-made and quite artful, especially the inset panda portrait with an origami-style plant for it to munch.  It does not smell like poo of any kind, unless Panda poo already smells like paper. I kinda doubt that.

I was not expecting this paper to be good for use with fountain pens, which are pretty much all I ever use. The paper is thick and spongy feeling, like most handmade pulp papers. Of course, that didn't stop me from giving it a try.

It went a bit better than I expected, and wasn't entirely unpleasant. It was obviously a bad pen and paper match--it was rough and there was plenty of feathering and "ink-bloat"--but I still found a lot to like about the paper. It is as soft and thick as the cover led me to believe. The front side is "smoother" but that is like saying my cat's tongue is smoother than 40-grit sandpaper. It is smattered with little fibers throughout. Fibers that came from poo.

The back side of the paper is quite different. It has a uniform "grid" pattern embedded into it from the paper manufacturing process. This type of paper is not press rolled like most commercial papers, but is dried on a screen, creating this unique pattern. I don't believe the notebook is designed for writing on both sides of the page, but I can't help myself. I hate wasting paper.

I tried the paper with a gel pen as well. I used the fake Mont Blanc someone gave my husband for free loaded with a Parker Gel refill. It's normally a nice writer, but I had a similar nagging fear that the tip of the pen was about to clog up with fibers.

Then came pencil. It is hard to go wrong with a pencil since they're fairly indestructible. If I'd had the right pencil in my hand, I might have found it a little more pleasant, but in this case, the one I had was a little light and hard for this paper. It dug into the soft paper and produced much too faint a line for my liking.

The best pen for the job on this particular paper, as I'm pained to admit, is an old fashioned paste-ink, 39¢ ballpoint pen.

The ballpoint matches pleasantly with the soft paper, and the lines are dark and easy. This paper makes for one of the better ballpoint pen experiences I've had, actually, mostly due to the pleasant sinking of the pen into the paper. It reminds me of when I used to flip over my mom's floppy plastic and rubber placemats when I was a kid and doodle on the backs of them. (Yes, I eventually got caught.) I thought I'd be as nagged by the fear of clogging the tip as I was with the gel pen, but for some reason, it wasn't a factor. It just didn't scratch into the paper as much.

On the whole, this is a nice notebook if you're not picky about your writing instruments. It is cute, it is quirky, it is well-made, and it is made of poo. How can you top that?

Inspiration Monday: Don't Fence Me In

Lately, I've been talking to one of my friends about his writing journey. He is an idea man, and a good one. He has laid out for me several times his plan for a sprawling epic fantasy novel that would probably make Game of Thrones seem like A Series of Unfortunate Events. I hope he writes it someday, because I'm already dying to read it.

He hopes he'll write it someday, too. He's trying, he's practicing, he's doing all the right things, but he keeps getting tangled up in his own feet. More specifically, he has fenced himself in.

In our last conversation, he mentioned that he feels he is weak on his ability to write description. "I have read a lot of books, and I can't do what real writers can do. I just don't have the vocabulary for it," he said. "I don't know the right words for everything I want to describe."

I can vouch that his vocabulary is fine. He lacks nothing to becoming a writer except confidence.

I've made the same mistake as my friend, and I will surely make it again. I think all writers do this--we compare our work to others and find it lacking. We compare our work to the image in our heads, the ideal, and we find it lacking there, too. We look at the watered-down word soup on the page, and we think we are not really creating, we are making literary mud-pies. Who would be interested in reading this? How do I do it well--no, how to I do it right?

When it comes to writing (or any type of art, really), we have an open field. We can do anything. There are rules, sure. Most of those rules are there for good reasons. They give us the structure we need to climb higher and strengthen our muscles. Beyond rules, there are expectations. Readers expect a mystery to read differently than Songbirds of South America, and they don't open a new literary fiction novel expecting the same wordy Victorian style as Pride and Prejudice. (Except for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.) Expectations, like rules, give us something to stand on, but they also give us something to play with. If we become afraid to do that, the gate closes behind us and we're stranded in our own corral.

My friend is caught up worrying so much about his inability to write like the authors he admires that he is paralyzed. "They're well-known, they get paid to do this, they made me love their work, so surely they're doing this right and I am doing it wrong." He is sure his work is so eaten up with fatal flaws that it is probably not worth saving, and he doesn't trust his own eyes.

It saddens me that my talented, intelligent friend has lost himself inside this box of expectations and absolutes where there is so much waiting to be discovered. With his ability to craft mythology, he has a whole fantastic world at his fingertips. He's just too afraid to open the floodgates and let it loose. What if he does it wrong?

Black ink on a white page is not all there is to writing. In that humble vessel lie infinite possibilities that come in all colors. There is not a right way and a wrong way to write your story. It is yours, as unique as your fingerprint. If you gave your favorite idea to any other writer, he or she would not be able to write the story you would have written. If it is to be, it has to come from you, and you have to get it out of your head and on the paper. There is nothing you can do in writing that you can't easily undo, so why not test your limits?

Don't let fear, rules, and expectations fence you in. They're just part of the landscape, and there is plenty to explore.

Book Review: Room by Emma Donoghue

Room by Emma Donoghue

Brief Synopsis: Room is not just a noun. Room is a world, a whole universe. At least that is what our narrator, freshly five-year-old Jack, thinks since the 11x11 room he inhabits with his mother is the only environment he has ever known. He was born there on Rug, he measures Plant's leaves by the width of his hand there, he counts his cereals at Table, he runs his there-and-backs around the outside of Bed, and reads with Ma, all the books in the world: Alice in Wonderland, The Runaway Bunny, and Dylan the Digger. Jack lives his life in Room, right up until nine o' clock when he has to switch off inside Wardrobe, because nine o' clock is when Keypad beeps and Door finally opens. Nine o' clock is when Old Nick comes.

Published: 2010

Format Read: Trade paperback, some round-robin convenience reading on my iPhone when I snagged the Kindle version on Amazon's Deal of the Day.

Comparison: Bear with me here. First, let me say, I haven't read anything else like Room when it comes to the direct plot. One element of the book that did ring familiar, however, was the precociousness and wonderment of the narrator, Jack. It reminds me of The Little Prince by Antoine de St. Exupery. Yes, it is a stretch to compare such a dark, adult novel to a beloved children's tale, but I would say there are a lot of similarities to Jack's story and that of the Little Prince. Besides, both books teach us that the voice of a child can carry a lot of wisdom, as long as an adult isn't too proud to listen.

In many ways, I saw Jack as the Little Prince and Ma as his beloved rose. Jack busies himself with his daily routines, just as the Little Prince was so careful to pull up the baobabs and sweep his volcanoes. He took care of his tiny, lonely planet as Jack cares for his friends in Room, even recognizing each object by it's proper name: Bath, Table, Plant, Bed, Wardrobe, etc. In The Little Prince, a rose finally grows on his tiny planet and becomes The Little Prince's companion. He loves the vain, beautiful rose, and he works to appease it and protect it. The rose is sometimes cold and demanding, which reminded me of when Ma would have her catatonic Gone days. I, the adult reader, know that she was overwhelmed, traumatized, desperate, and psychologically fragile, but Jack just knew she was Gone, and he struggled to keep his routine and play by Ma's rules, Room's rules. As the story unfolds, Ma begins to depend on Jack, even telling him at one point, "I thought you were supposed to be my superhero." Jack, terrified and confused, does his best to keep up his end of the bargain, just as the Little Prince did for his rose.

Jack wonders about the land of TV, where he believes all things outside of room reside, that they are all make-believe. His forays of imagination remind me of The Little Prince visiting other planets and learning about others different from him, and different from each other. Like the Little Prince, Jack soaks up every drop of information thrust upon him and he is brave and strong and resilient--but in the end, he endeavors only to be with his Ma. The Little Prince must always go back his rose.

I could see turning the tables and looking at it the other way, too. Ma is trapped in Room by herself, surviving the best she can, and then comes Jack. She loves him with all her love but it is a demanding task to be wholly responsible for the life of your child (and Jack is all child, just as egocentric as children his age are supposed to be), especially when they're stuck on what is ostensibly their own little planet.

Review: It is possible for something unpleasant to be beautiful. That is just how I would describe Room: unapologetically uncomfortable, and beautiful anyway.

It has been a long time since I read a book that got under my skin the way this one did. It devastated me, it challenged me, it confused me, hurt me, and healed me. It sent me around my house with a tape measure trying to understand what it would be like to exist--not just survive, but exist--only in an 11x11 space. It seeped into my dreams and turned them to nightmares, sometimes as simply as a key turning in a lock. It followed me to work, where I narrowed my eyes at the brown truck in front of me with the groceries in the back, thinking maybe it was Old Nick out bargain shopping for Sundaytreat.

Any book that sticks on your heels like that has done something right.

Diagram of Room courtesy of roomthebook.com. Go there.

This book is as bold and solid as Room's big metal door. You can't find the seams--just when I thought Jack was a little too aware, a little too clever to be an accurate five-year-old, he'd hit me with something so accurately childlike that would swing me back around. This can be a cheap trick in the hands of a lesser writer--whipping the reader back and forth like a tennis match--and it doesn't usually work. Not so with Jack. Donoghue makes the necessary excuses for Jack's ability to tell us this story, but she doesn't take unfair advantage of the situation. She builds us a well-crafted narrator, who is as honest as he is unreliable.

If the idea of an unreliable narrator makes you nervous, don't let it. The action happens in front of Jack's face, and while his limitations distort the experience, it only adds to the sense of foreboding we have, knowing we are so much bigger and stronger than him, that we understand so much more than this little boy.

If you're the type who likes symbolism, I'd say there is plenty to mine from here. For one, in a lot of ways, Room is like a womb where Jack has continued his isolated gestation. His mother still breastfeeds him, which first scandalized me, but later softened me. I had to think what it was like for Ma--what connection that must have brought her, what comfort for her son. There's also the pragmatic side of things as well. As long as she keeps her milk, no matter what Old Nick does to their food supply, she can keep Jack going just a little longer. The feeding becomes a kind of antenna for what is going on in the connection between Ma and Jack, and fits with the idea of Jack, Mr. Five, but also newborn in so many of the ways important to us readers. 

Working in the field of mental health and being a staunch advocate for those with mental health challenges, it was important for me that this book get the psychology right. I don't expect an author to get a degree in Developmental Psychology to be able to write a book like this, but they have to get the anchors in the right places. I'm pleased to say I think Emma Donoghue was right on the money. She had to filter everything through Jack, and he had to pick up on just the right things to cue us in without him understanding too much (a tall order if ever there was one), but she manages it beautifully, and we get a sincere understanding for the types of physical and emotional trauma and regrowth these characters must endure. She finds ways to sneak in terms and definitions, sure, but I found the real truth to be in their faltering strength and denial. Those are things I see all the time because no one wants to admit where they are weak and hurt, especially someone who has had those places exploited.

I don't want to say too much about the plot arc itself because I don't want to spoil the book, but it is fair to say it has two distinct halves. It is likely you will prefer one over the other depending on what you like to read, but personally, I enjoyed both for their individual merits. Both halves have their own objectives which I felt were achieved nicely.

I haven't read any of Emma Donoghue's other work, but I plan to seek it out. Even writing in the voice of a five-year-old, it is clear to see she is masterful with language, and she is not afraid to boldly show you her story without watering it down with unnecessary (and self-conscious) explanations.

Back when I was a bookseller, I had a few favorite books I liked to handsell. Among them were The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson, and The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier. All of these books have something unconventional about them--structure, style, voice, plot--that would sometimes scare away a potential reader. I pressed those books into people's hands time and time again and said, "This is a Trust Novel. That means that no matter how many times you think in the beginning that you don't get it, that you don't understand, that there are too many 'whys', you have to promise yourself you are going to keep turning the pages. You are safe in this book, because no matter how hard it may seem at first, this author will take you where you need to be and it is so worth it."

Room is a Trust Novel. Emma Donoghue is not going to let you down. That's not to say everyone will like everything about this book, or any other, but if you give her a chance to draw you in, she will tell you a story that will haunt you and change the way you think.

Trust me.