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"  FICTION:  Emma Donoghue,  Room  (Little, Brown)  Room is a thriller, a love story, a tale of a horrible crime, a cautionary fable about our contemporary culture\u2014and it&amp;#039;s all told from the point of view of a five-year-old boy: amazing stuff, this full-length monologue about the boy himself, his close relationship with his mother, and the small room in which he&amp;#039;s lived his entire life so far. When the mother concocts a way to get them out of their captivity and into the real world once again, culture comes rushing at them with a fire that almost overcomes all the positive love his mother gave him regardless of their dark and foreboding situation. The way Jack explains what happens at each stage of their changing reality is a tour-de-force in literary imagining, an exciting and upsetting thriller that will keep you hearing Jack&amp;#039;s voice in your head well after the last page.\u2014Jana Siciliano, Metuchen, NJ Imagine being locked in a garden shed with your mom. Your captor is a mysterious man whom you&amp;#039;ve nicknamed Old Nick. He appears in the night to rape your mother while you&amp;#039;re shut in a closet. You eat whatever canned food and scraps your mom can beg from him. You&amp;#039;ve never been outside of this room in your life. Now imagine this scenario through the eyes of a spirited five-year-old. And thanks to your mother&amp;#039;s fierce love, you only know a packed routine filled with songs and games. That&amp;#039;s the paradox of Room. Through this daring and layered story, we see this bleak life both through the eyes of the imaginative child, Jack, and with our perspective. So we see both the wonder and the horrific situation Jack and his Ma are in. The premise of Room promises to break your heart, and it does. But Jack&amp;#039;s lively voice is strangely optimistic, and so his story becomes both repulsive and addictive. Donahue has built a scarily believable world for her characters.\u2014Sara Miller, Oceanside, CA Room is a hauntingly innocent ride along the dark edge of life and humanity, part time-machine, part tabloid, part mystery, and part adventure. Jack&amp;#039;s innocent viewpoint and descriptions of the world around him amused and sometimes confounded me, but I always found them to be compelling. It was easy to slip into his eyes and yet, as an adult, I sympathized with Ma and applauded her bravery, strength, resilience, and intelligence.\u2014 Lynn Fantle, Clarksburg, MD I have one word to say: Room! No other book I have read in a long time even comes close to this one. My heart was wrenched and my stomach was in knots.\u2014Barbara Taylor Aitken, Carmel, IN Room is a minor miracle, balancing a story contemporary in its details with a fable about love and resilience. Jack and his Ma are believable, wonderful, and unforgettable. Don&amp;#039;t miss this novel.\u2014Heather Seggel, Ukiah, CA When I watch my children play and enjoy their life, I think about this story.\u2014Tracey Cheesman, West Salem, IL  NONFICTION:  Heather Sellers,  You Don&amp;#039;t Look Like Anyone I Know  (Riverhead)  Despite this book being about the tragedy of abuse and its aftereffects, Sellers has truly hit a home run. As an adult, Sellers is diagnosed with prosopagnosia, a &amp;quot;rare neurological disorder that prevents her from reliably recognizing people&amp;#039;s faces.&amp;quot; Slowly, she comes to realize the possibility that her own mental challenges are due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents. It&amp;#039;s not often that a book about the tragic effects of mental illness is as engrossing and entertaining as it is educational. This is a great read, and Sellers should be commended for this marvelous yet heartbreaking tale of her life.\u2014Christy Richards, Lakewood, CO Imagine that you live in a world where you don&amp;#039;t recognize people unless they wear something familiar or walk differently from everyone else. Imagine that you don&amp;#039;t even know that this is wrong, or that maybe it means you&amp;#039;re crazy. This is not just a story about a woman&amp;#039;s journey to find out what&amp;#039;s wrong with her, but also an affirmation that people can live through so much and turn out to be sane and rational. I admire Sellers&amp;#039; bravery and her determination to find answers to her questions.\u2014Tracey Cheesman, West Salem, IL When I began reading Sellers&amp;#039; book, I figured it would be about the misadventures of a child growing up with mentally ill parents and slowly learning that most people&amp;#039;s parents were not like hers. Many autobiographies written by adults who had strange and difficult childhoods are interesting at first and then begin to trail off into a life story that seems more important for the writer to have written than the reader to have read. This book is different. Despite the dramatic difficulties Sellers faced as a child, her story is not full of regret and bitterness\u2014angst at the past, and years of torturous self-hatred as she slowly begins to recover. No, this is a story about a woman taking responsibility for her life and her understanding of herself.\u2014Jenji Henson, Austin, TX For all of us, our parents and their actions make perfect sense while we are young; Sellers&amp;#039; gift is to look back through the lens of adulthood not with criticism and shame, but with compassion and understanding.\u2014Alta Dawson, Los Gatos, CA. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a11466/2010-readers-prize-grand-prix-516200/>