Title: Rooms Author: Lauren Oliver
Published: September 23, 2014
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 305
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Wealthy Richard Walker has just died, leaving behind his country house full of rooms packed with the detritus of a lifetime. His estranged family—bitter ex-wife Caroline, troubled teenage son Trenton, and unforgiving daughter Minna—have arrived for their inheritance.
But the Walkers are not alone. Prim Alice and the cynical Sandra, long dead former residents bound to the house, linger within its claustrophobic walls. Jostling for space, memory, and supremacy, they observe the family, trading barbs and reminiscences about their past lives. Though their voices cannot be heard, Alice and Sandra speak through the house itself—in the hiss of the radiator, a creak in the stairs, the dimming of a light bulb.
The living and dead are each haunted by painful truths that will soon surface with explosive force. When a new ghost appears, and Trenton begins to communicate with her, the spirit and human worlds collide—with cataclysmic results.
Lauren Oliver’s first adult novel, Rooms is subtle and unassuming. Six points of view rotate to give the reader a view of a house’s (and family’s) history. The author’s prose is certainly lovely, and the idea itself appeals to me—but at the end of it all, I was never drawn in or immersed in the text like I would have liked to be, especially in so character-driven a novel.
It’s possible that the constantly shifting, brief glimpses into each narrator’s perspective just didn’t do it for me. The Walker family and the ghosts who inhabit the house were each interesting people in and of themselves, and I liked the way each of them had their own side to things that often conflicted with another character’s claims. Yet at the end of it all, I never connected with any one of these six characters in the way I usually want to in fiction. There wasn’t enough character development for me to truly get a good feel for them, and at the end of it all I had no real sense of growth. These people converged on the house to prepare for a funeral, and once that funeral was done, they went on, just as they had before. I would have liked the feel that uncovering the ghosts’ secrets had impacted the Walkers in some way, but I didn’t get a definite impression of that from Rooms.
The plot itself is relatively simple. When Richard Walker dies, his ex-wife, children, and granddaughter come to clean out the house and host the funeral. Each of the four Walkers has some sort of secret to hide, as do the two ghosts who have, over time, become one with the house. Oliver cleverly takes readers on a “tour” through the house, and each section of the story is focused on a particular room—I did like that technique. At the same time, the unassuming nature of the story didn’t draw me in or excite me in any way, and when a big hullabaloo happened at the funeral itself, it was so drastically different from the rest of the book that I couldn’t buy into it at all, especially considering all the overdramatic coincidences that went into the reveal. For a book that so intricately develops each character’s secrets, Rooms went about exposing them with all the grace and subtlety of a sledgehammer. I did not like that technique.
I did mention finding Lauren Oliver’s prose to be noteworthy, and it is. Rooms is gorgeously, atmospherically written, and though I’m not a huge fan of the book, neither can I deny that this author has quite a skill with words. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough to save this book from the overwhelming apathy I feel for it.
Altogether, this was a disappointment. I love Oliver’s writing and her ideas, but the finished product itself left much to be desired. More often than not, I was bored while reading Rooms, and that’s not really a sign of a worthwhile read.
