Room by Emma Donoghue

"Hey, you know what, if you put him under your pillow a fairy will come in the night invisibly and turn him into money."
"Not in here, sorry," says Ma.
"Why not?"
"The tooth fairy does not know about Room."  Her eyes are looking through the walls.
Outside has everything.  Whenever I think of a thing now like skis or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos, I have to remember they're real, they're actually happening in Outside all together.  It makes my head tired.  And people too, firefighters teachers burglars babies saints soccer players and all sorts, they're all really in Outside.  I'm not there, though, me and Ma, we're the only ones not there.  Are we still real?
After dinner Ma tells me Hansel and Gretel and How the Berlin Wall Fell Down and Rumpelstiltskin.  I like when the queen has to guess the little man's name or else he'll take her baby away.  "Are stories true?"
"Which ones?"
"The mermaid mother and Hansel and Gretel and all them."
"Well," says Ma, "not literally."
"What's--"
"They're magic, they're not about real people walking around today."
"So they're fake."
"No, no.  Stories are a different kind of true."
My face is all scrunched up from trying to understand.  "Is the Berlin Wall true?"
"Well, there was a wall, but it's not there anymore."
I'm so tired I'm going to rip in two like Rumpelstiltskin did at the end.
"Night-night," says Ma, shutting the doors of Wardrobe, "sleep tight, don't let the bugs bite."

Though I had to drive one hour home from volunteering downtown, complete thirty convoluted Calculus problems, search high and low to find the golden ratio between Hershey's syrup and milk for the perfect chocolate milk, and much more, my most daunting task of the night has without a doubt been picking just one passage from Emma Donoghue's Room that, as your blog says, Mr. Coon, 'illustrates why [I] find it to be excellent storytelling.'  Why the difficulty?  Well, just about every carefully placed punctuation mark, conversation, and moment of narration sparkles as some of the best storytelling I have experienced in my not-quite-adult life. And thus picking just one brief passage that demonstrates the required criterium has taken me nearly twenty minutes.  I finally settled on the above passage for both its excellent storytelling, as well as its relevance that aptly suits this assignment and the question, 'What makes good storytelling?' posed in class today.  However, Room is not merely good storytelling--it is so marvelous that it reminds the reader why stories exist.  Aside from the captivating plot that keeps the reader palpitating whilst dancing on his or her toes out of excitement and Donoghue's carefully crafted wording that makes the reader pause and reflect to think about such heavy subjects as human nature, Room's strongest feature that makes it a storytelling gem is its endearing characters.  Precocious, but socially deficient from years of isolation, 5 year-old narrator Jack and his adoring, but emotionally and physically damaged, mother are the hero and heroine, respectively of this at-times jaw-dropping, but always charming, tale.  Few stories are so magical that they make even the unswayed of readers--yours truly typically being self-categorized as this--laugh, cry, and just be completely and utterly rapt in the novel's caress.  If you ever pick up Room, beware: you will be so consumed in Jack's colorful world, you will not be able to floss, count, or tie your shoelaces properly until you finish the novel, put it down, and just say, "Wow."