"Room" Gets Inside Me

Room by Emma Donahue was recommended to me by my daughter, an avid reader and administrator on a Nook e-readers site, and by a fellow writer on an e-mail list I subscribe too. The writer recommended it as a powerful child protagonist voice.  My daughter just said it was a good book. She started to say, ‘I really enjoyed it,’ and then decided ‘enjoy’ was definitely not the right word. “It’s disturbing,” she told me.

Laughing at Life Jungle Style

The 1960s were an era of counter-cultural rebellion—young people renouncing their parents' striving for affluence in the suburbs and choosing instead the simple lifestyle. For many of my generation that meant a commune with free love and drugs, no bras or baths. For some of us touched by the Kingdom of God, it meant committing to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth, no matter the cost.  I always pictured myself in a thatched hut in the jungle, befriending the ‘natives,’ wrestling with the puzzle of an unwritten language, creating an alphabet and translating the Scriptures.