Ma holds me tight. "Jack," she says, "I'm a bit strange this week, aren't I?" 
 I don't know, because everything's strange. 
 "I keep messing up. I know you need me to be your ma but I'm having to remember how to be me as well at the same time and it's..." 
 But I thought the her and the Ma were the same. 
 An interesting concept but flawed in its execution, Room utilizes the stream-of-consciousness narrative of five-year-old Jack to describe the life he shares with his young mother, a victim of kidnap and rape who works hard to create a new paradigm in which only the things inside Room are real and everything else is Outside. This distant, read-between-the-lines narrative is sometimes achingly heartbreaking, such as the way Jack's mother disguises a daily attempt to call for help as a game called "Scream," but more often than not, it's a bit irritating that the majority of the prose is a flat outline of what they do and say, with a lot of the focus being on Jack's tedious misunderstandings of figurative expressions. While a creative concept, Room is limited by what a five-year-old vernacular can express.