Room

Room is a novel that explores more than just a room. It explores mother son relationships, children's minds and processing abilities, exploring new worlds, captive life, kidnapper and kidnappee relationships, and public opinions. Room is about a young woman and her five year old boy. The woman was kidnapped six years ago, impregnated, and then locked in a shed in the man's backyard, never getting to leave, never getting to do anything. She had her child in that room, on her rug, by herself. The man wasn't even there to comfort her, he never comforted her. The only thing good in her life is her simple minded son who only knows the room. He has names for all of the objects in the room which he calls rug or bed or spider. He thinks of them as friends because he never got to learn what a friend is. The way I know this, and the most interesting aspect of the book, is because the book is narrated by the boy. We are reading his mind, seeing things as he sees them, and it feels very realistic. That is what, at least in my opinion, really makes this book so exceptional. The other part is the intense social commentary that emerges as the mother and son themselves emerge. The two of them have to live in a hospital type building, not only because they have not been in the sun for six years, so they get burnt very very quickly, but also because the boy has a very hard time getting used to the real world. His mother often tried to convince him that there was more than just the room, but he never believed her until he was thrust into it. If the reality of a whole new world is not enough to cause a child to have an anxiety disorder, then the constant paparazzi and invading questions would be. The mother's story is broadcast all over the news, making it so that people swarm the hospital, trying to get an interview with her, trying to find out what it was like inside. This is the part that really hit me, the fact that people so blatantly did not care about the woman, they just cared about the fact that she had been locked away for years. They never once considered her as a real person, just something for their own entertainment. This whole thing with the people is the most jarring part of the book, as it is so completely accurate. It really brings to  life how people as a whole react to disaster situations, they rarely try to help or sympathize, they just ooh and ahh until they are satisfied, which is when they leave. This is really shown in the book and that is why I believe that it has true literary merit.

Frankenstein is a monster.

Frankenstein is a monster. He really truly is. All he does throughout his entire life is hurt people. When he was little, whether it was with consent or not, he obviously had sex with his adopted sister. Or they at least had a more than familial relationship. I mean not only did that possibly hurt Elizabeth, but it hurt me as a reader. I do not want the first thing that I read in a book to be about childhood sort of incest. Then after Victor's mother died he just goes off to college, leaving his family mourning, although in all fairness he did stay for awhile to mourn with them. However, as soon as he got to college, he stopped trying to contact them. His family would send him letters, asking if he was okay, asking for him to mail them back, but he never did. He just completely blew off his family, who love him so much. He just hurt them without a second fault. Then once the creature was created, he just left him to fend for himself. Causing the monster to have to raise himself, teaching him that parents are useless. Victor just continuously hurt the monster, without ever even trying to befriend him. After Victor fell into his crazy sickness, he started to hurt Clerval, preventing him from his studies and making him listen to his crazy rambling, which in all honesty probably made Clerval lose it a little too. Then when the creature started killing people, that was all Victors fault, ultimately he hurt those people. When the creature burned down the cottagers' house out of jealousy and rage, it was really Victor burning down their house. He did not even know these people and yet he ruined their lives. He created the creature, he didn't teach him right or wrong, he just let him go, causing him to become a crazy murderous monster. Victor killed his own family, Victor burned the Cottagers' house down, Victor killed Clerval, Victor made himself sick and crazy. Personally, I think that this book was less about feminism, the unjust society, creator and creature, or any of that other stuff, and more about the fact that your actions cause serious chain reactions. If you start out being mean to other people, the world will be mean to you. Victor brought all of his family's plight onto them because of the way he mistreated everyone in his life. He had no respect for the world, so the world had no respect for him. It just wanted to make him suffer just as much as everyone else did.

In a Crooked Little House

 In a Crooked Little House... lives a crooked little man. If that one line doesn't make you want to read this book, I don't know what could. This little 230 page novel was brilliant in its own way. It wasn't eye opening, it didn't teach me a life lesson, but it was such an amazing novel with plot twists that were honestly unpredictable. The writing is crisp and intelligent, the word choices are perfect. For a little five dollar horror novel, this book is surprisingly in depth. The author, A G Cascone, went really deep into character development, so much so that I felt as if I was the character at certain points. His characters were so unique, although they did fit into the archetypes. At first it was hard to determine who the main character was, as it is narrated by an omnipresence, but it became apparent that Cassie and Iggy Boy were the most important. They both have their own 'quest': Cassie's to survive life in school without being terrorized for being on an academic scholarship, Iggy Boy's to either marry, or brutally murder Cassie, whichever was necessary to make her his and only his. The heroes in this story aren't actually the main characters, there is Jake the maintenance man, who seems to be missing something important in his head and who also seems to have inappropriate feelings for Cassie, and Slater, the quiet photographer who ends up being the courageous boyfriend, although he was originally suspected to be Iggy Boy. The only shadow in this book is actually Iggy Boy, which of course is a self assigned nickname for the new house master, the handsome, young, totally lovable Mr Gilliard's second personality. Iggy Boy is in all honesty a psycho killer, photographing his next victim until he figures out a suitable death to 'punish them for their crimes'. After he has killed them in the appropriate fashion, he takes many compromising photos of them, which he takes to his little room above the dorms, develops, and then hangs all over his walls. The herald in this story, which does not occur until nearly the end of the book when everything really starts going down, is when Iggy Boy kidnaps Cassie from the school dance and locks her up in a gym. The official 'call to adventure' is when Jake makes Slater leave the dance, after he had been searching for her in there, and takes him down to the gym. The shapeshifter is Mr Gilliard who starts as the friend, the only person Cassie talks to after Trevor nearly rapes her, but then he turns into Iggy Boy, brutally murdering people, strangling them with the vacuum cord then hanging them from the rafters, pushing them down the stairs and snapping their necks. There aren't any obvious tricksters in this book, maybe Slater since he is occasionally funny, but not really. The only Allies are the two heroes along with Cassie. So basically, this novel fit into all of the traditional archetypes, but then it completely broke from the norm, throwing crazy plot twists and awesome descriptive scenes, making it totally awesome.