Book Review | Book Chatter

Hating Olivia
By Mark SaFranko
HarperCollins
November 2010
262pp

The Short of It:

Hating Olivia is about obsession and lust and how easily we can lose ourselves when we are confronted with it.

The Rest of It:

Max is the type of guy who cruises through life. He’s educated, but unfocused. He would rather write, than make ends meet but the writing doesn’t happen too often. Although a bit unstable when it comes to finances, overall he’s a pretty happy guy.

Enter Olivia Aphrodite. Olivia is drop-dead gorgeous. She too, is not too stable in the finance department and has made a living working dead-end jobs and letting men (with money), take “care” of her.

Although their personalities are quite different, Max and Olivia move in together and it goes downhill from there.

The story is told from Max’s point of view so what we get is the incredible frustration he experiences in loving a creature like Olivia. Max is consumed by her and completely obsessed with her. As their relationship progresses, he realizes that he needs to break it off, but how? How does one extract himself from an addiction such as this?

I must tell you right off, that there is a lot of sex in this little novel. A lot of sex, and a lot of language that you may not be comfortable with. Putting that aside, I found myself able to relate to both characters. Although you may never experience a relationship such as the one Max has with Olivia, you’ve probably known someone who has.

The story is a bit repetitive because this couple flounders over and over again while trying to make it work. But there was something about the novel that kept me reading. Perhaps, I wanted Max to find a way out. Perhaps it was a bit like watching a train wreck. Either way, I could not pull myself away from the novel and found myself completely wrapped-up in the story.

The writing is tight and the characters never waver. Also, Max is quite the reader so there are lots of literary references that you might enjoy. Overall, I enjoyed reading it even though it’s not something I would have normally picked-up on my own.

Source: Sent to me by the publisher.

Room
By Emma Donoghue
Little Brown & Company
September 2010
321pp

The Short of It:

Room boasts an original premise but falls flat from overly simplistic writing and one-dimensional characters.

The Rest of It:

*No Spoilers*

For those who are not aware of the premise, a young woman is abducted and forced to live in a room that is only 11 x 11 in size. There, she gives birth to a baby boy by the name of Jack. As Jack grows-up, his main source of information comes from his mother and what she chooses to teach him, as well as the knowledge he obtains from the few amenities afforded to him while in captivity.

The story is told from Jack’s point of view. This works to a degree, in that it makes it easier to read. At five years of age, Jack doesn’t fully understand what is going on. As a reader, I was comforted by his innocence but also felt an overwhelming sense of sadness about their situation. In this sense, using Jack as the storyteller worked.

We’re shown early on that Jack is an exceptional child. His vocabulary, for a child in his particular situation is quite advanced. This is where I had problems with believability. The conversations that he has with his mother (only known as Ma) don’t match his every day thought processes. He thinks as a five-year-old would, but there were spots where he speaks like a much older child. This struck me as odd and pulled me out of the narrative many times.

As we get further into the story, I wanted to know more about Ma. I wanted to hear her point of view but we never get that. In fact, her real name is never revealed. She is just known as “Ma” and to me, not giving her an identity seemed almost criminal.

Without giving away the plot, I will say that the second half of the book is quite different from the first half. Whatever pulled me in during that first half, was gone by the second half. I felt as if the author threw things in to make the story more plausible. She was correct to do it, as plausibility is key to a story like this, but what she tossed in wasn’t fully fleshed out. It seemed formulaic to me and not written from the heart. Because of it, I lost that connection to the characters and in a book that only has a character list of just a few people, that’s not good.

To sum it up, Donoghue did an excellent job of creating the room itself. Deciding what it would contain, where things were placed, considering all of the logistics such as how to deal with the food supply issue or health related issues, etc. I felt as if I were in that room with them. She also did a great job with the day-to-day activities that Ma and Jack engaged in. However, the story petered out for me in that second half. Jack seemed to lose his voice and Ma, who I really wanted to care about, became unlikable.

I think I would have liked this book quite a bit more had it been told from Ma’s point of view. It would have been a different book for sure, but I think it would have had the depth that this book lacked.