Rooms is a novel that doesn't fully know whose story it wants to tell. Richard Walker, elderly and wealthy businessman living in solitude in his grand expanse of a house, dies, leaving his estranged family to pick up the pieces. As the story progresses, we see more and more of the problems each family member is plagued with. Ex-wife Caroline has a massive alcohol problem, constantly drowning herself in more and more spirits and causing a rift between herself and her children. Daughter Minna is struggling with her own personal demons and memories of an empty childhood whilst also trying her best to raise her own daughter, 6 year old Amy. Teenaged son Trenton is in recovery after a horrific car accident and feels nothing but disdain for the rest of his family members and wishes to die. All of these problems culminate around Richard Walker's upcoming funeral as they wade through his leftover belongings and uncover secrets they had tried to forget. 
 If this had been the only component to Rooms, I can easily see myself loving this book. But for better or worse, the Walkers are not alone in the house. Three ghosts also inhabit the mansion's walls and each one of them also has their own story to tell. We have the oldest ghost, Alice, a prim and proper lady from the early 1900s, Sandra a woman murdered by gunshot but whose life was not very fulfilling, and the newest ghost, an unnamed girl who suddenly appears while the Walkers are sorting through the house. Each of the ghosts have their own backstory and each of them have more pain beneath the surface than first assumed. 
 Caroline, Minna, Trenton, Alice, Sandra, and new ghost. These are our primary characters, but we still have numerous secondary characters to explore. There's Katie, the strange teenage girl who shows up every now and then to Trenton while he considers suicide. We have Amy, seeing the events of the house from her house perspective. Minna has several gentlemen callers whom she uses as attempts to break through her empty shell and let her feel something again. There are countless secondary characters in Alice and Sandra's backstories, from Ed to Martin to Thomas to Maggie to Sissy. There's a missing girl the police are looking for and fear might be dead. Richard Walker is implied to have had an affair and the lady in question plays a role in the drama. The list seems to just keep growing. 
 So with a cast of characters this big it's no wonder that the book seems unsure whom it actually wants to focus on. For the majority of the book, the ghosts' backstories and the drama unfolding in the house coexist independently, and it can be difficult to keep track of everyone's respective background information. To counteract this problem, characters would foreshadow upcoming events, giving hints at the darkness lurking in everyone's backstories. But the pacing of the book is languid, so by the time anything is "revealed" it's lost its impact. 
 The ending actually does a very good job in tying everything back up and giving purpose to the giant cast of characters. Up until the very last 50 pages or so, I was strongly of the opinion that the ghosts and their backstories were extra baggage in this book. The Walkers and their family problems are REALLY interesting. They are a complete mess of a family and are all hurting in different ways. In comparison, the ghosts were really dull. But the ending connected everyone in a quite satisfying way. I suddenly understood the reason as to WHY the ghosts were there, and appreciated it a lot more. 
 I still think that large portions and subplots in this book could have been culled. The missing girl subplot is awkwardly thrusted in there and its resolution is shallow at best, I didn't care about Minna's attempts at healing through random sex, and a lot of unneeded information was given in the ghost's backstories that did nothing in regards to the greater plot. Lauren Oliver writes incredibly well and the Walker's family dynamic is engaging to explore. If we could have focused on the Walkers, cut the rest of the secondary characters and subplots that went no where, and been more picky on what backstory to give for the ghosts, we could have had a very tight and well written character exploration of a struggling family in the wake of a death. But as it stands, Rooms is slow and boring for the majority of its pages, attempting to garner strong emotional connections with the reader through excessive backstory that just bogs down the heart of the book.