Rooms audiobook

We’ve nested in the walls like bacteria. We’ve taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing--we’ve made it our own. Or maybe it’s life that is the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleansing, a cure. If death ever takes a holiday I expect he might vacation in Coral River, the upstate New York locale where Richard Walker lives…well…lived. Richard’s recent passing is what has brought the Walker family back together for a spell. A funeral, a burial, a will-reading, and a chance to go over some of the events, the challenges, the hopes and disappointments, the failings of their lives. Ex-wife Caroline tries to lubricate the process with a steady ingestion of alcohol. Their children are not faring much better. Twenty-something single-mother Minna has a taste for spirits as well. Failure and desperation to fill the emptiness inside will do that. Even the introduction of cosmetic surgery and various prescription meds seem unable to fill that void. Trenton is Richard and Caroline’s teenage son, and he has issues. He barely survived a car crash that left him feeling even more of an outsider than he already was. Trenton sees things that the rest of us cannot, actual holes in the fabric of reality. He wonders if he might be better off dead. Of course some of the household residents already are.Sandra, whose gray matter once decorated a wall, and Alice, an abused wife who has also contributed to the body count of the house, have made the place their own, or is it the other way round? These golden girls are not necessarily precious. In addition to remembering their lives and observing the Walkers, they squabble and tell lies. And while they may not be able to exactly tote luggage or dig ditches, it is possible for them to effect small acts in the living world, pushing this, bursting that. Having some unresolved issues keeps them from being able to open a doorway to a less geographically restricted existence. Reports of missing children also figure in, from decades past and right now. There are plenty of secrets to be delved into here. Such as just how did Sandra and Alice die? What happened to the missing girls? Who is that new girl ghost who just showed up? And who is Minna banging now? This is not a scary ghost story sort of tale. No spectres coming to take over anyone’s body. More Topper than The Evil Dead, although not a comedy. A bit of spookery goes on, but there are two elements here that seem dominant, mystery and sadness. In a way, I was reminded of Agatha Christie, as Oliver presents readers with a sequence of mysteries to be solved, offering clues here and there, hints, red herrings, the usual tools of that trade. While the ghosts may not be scary, their stories and the stories of the living as well are intensely haunting. Choices, mistakes, regrets, the impact of the past echoes in the present, for both the dead and the living. Oliver organizes her story into eleven parts, representing diverse rooms in the house. The tales told connect with each room in turn. Rooms features an ensemble cast. Oliver’s characters are well-drawn and very human. It is hard not to sympathize with Alice or relate to Trenton. And it is possible to understand why some of the others behave the way they do, given what we learn of their histories. There is a lot here about identity, being oneself or wanting to be someone, or something else, to have some other life, and coping with other people’s masks. It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time. There is also a lot about being trapped whether as a child in an abusive household, a woman in an abusive marriage, a teen in what seems a dead-end existence, or a ghost in an empty house. There are some moments of humor, although none of the LOL variety, but dollops of charm do seep through the walls from time to time. In short, Rooms is a fun, engaging and fast read. There is real content in the very believable characters’ attempts to make sense of their lives. While this spirited entry into the adult novel category is not the sort of ghost tale that will cause anyone to leave on the lights at night, there is considerable material here that is indeed quite haunting. Review first posted – 6/13/14Publication date - 9/23/2014 This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!=============================EXTRA STUFFLauren Oliver, is the pen name adopted by Laura Schechter, a young 30-something author who has already seen considerable success with her youth-oriented novels, most notably the YA Delirium trilogy. Rooms was her first novel for adults. Oliver’s parents are both literature professors. Dad is Harold Schechter, who has written many books on true-crime and American popular culture. Oliver lives in Brooklyn. Here are links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages, and to her blog and Tumblr pages as well.If that is not enough you can also check her out on YouTube

One of the scariest things to think of- is that someone is always watching you. Watching you in your most personal moments. Ghosts. Ghosts in your house. Ghosts invading your privacy. Your private moments as entertainment for the living is bad enough...but how about for the dead? That IS scary!!! It makes you want to know who lived there before you? Who can be peeking behind the curtain?? It's not always the living... The dead are right there too- watching....and judging...and waiting....waiting for their moment to be set free...Richard Walker has died....and all of his family gathers around in his house. The house he died in- the house OTHERS have died in....and those others, are watching his family- watching them closely. Alice and Sandra have spent years watching the house- and the people in it- because that is all they can do now....now that they are dead.They died within these walls- one in particular is itching to find an excuse to be able to flee. She is waiting for the inhabitants to make one wrong move to help her do that. She is watching...patiently.ROOMS very spooooky- very different from your normal, average, every day ghostly read. Expect the unexpected.

If you've read Liesl & Po, you know that a ghost story by Lauren Oliver is not going to be your typical horror fare. This is a slow, secretive book that intertwines the lives of the dead and the living, and yet its tone is, in turns, contemplative, chilling, and in the end, nearly unbearably sad. I've no doubt that some YA readers will struggle with this unusual story, and some will be frustrated with not having everything tied up neatly in a bow by the end. But if you appreciate well-crafted adult fiction, and if you enjoy the author's writing, Lauren Oliver's first adult novel is definitely worth your time. I do wish there weren't so many names starting with the same consonant, though. Martin, Minna, Maggie...it's a lot to keep track of, especially in a relatively short book with so many characters and so many puzzles. And in the hands of another author, this might be a 3.5 because I would have liked some parts explored more in depth, but the writing is so good and the story made me think so much that I have to tip it up. Perhaps a bit more of a review to come.

People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something - the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing - remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all. When Richard Walker died, he left behind a lifetime of accumulated wealth, estranged and horribly embittered alcoholic wife Caroline, nymphomaniac daughter Minna who is unable to form any real emotional bond with anyone, and suicidal teenage son Trenton who is like Holden Caulfield on steroids. He also left behind a house inhabited by two ghosts, the empathetic Alice and the cynical Sandra.As the family comes to claim their inheritance, their already troubled lives begin to unravel further. Trenton, recovering from an injury which almost left him dead, moves nearer and nearer to suicide. Minna goes on a desperate orgy of copulation, coupling with all and sundry including the undertaker and FedEx courier. And Caroline spirals down into an alcohol-induced fugue, drinking her way to destruction. The only person who seems to be happy is Amy, Minna's daughter, who is living in childhood's fantasy land.Trenton can hear the ghosts, especially a newcomer who refuses to reveal her identity to Alice and Sandra. He is urged to cross over to the other side by her; however, he is pulled back into life by Katie, a mysterious will-o-the-wisp of a girl. As the days go by, Alice becomes more and more powerful as she keeps on attempting to set the house on fire which, according to her, will result in her release. Everything comes to a head during Walker's memorial service, with all the various story-lines converging and tangling up and there are enough secrets revealed to fill a dozen Agatha Christie novels.***"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Said Leo Tolstoy. This novel could be cited as a book-length example of this statement: only thing is, unhappy would the understatement of the century here. Almost every family in this novel, including the ones of the ghosts as well as various minor characters who come into contact with the Walkers, is almost disastrously broken. Extramarital affairs, heartbreak, domestic violence, murder, suicide - you name it, the story has it.However, for all it utter bleakness, the author manages to hold our interest - mainly because of the mastery of the narrative. The story proceeds in multiple POVs: those of the dead Alice and Sandra interspersed with those of Caroline, Trenton, Minna and Amy. The ghosts talk in first person, while the live protagonists are portrayed in third person - a narrative device which draws readers into the spirit world, making it nearer to them than the temporal world.The ghosts are inextricably tied up with the house. Built by Ed, Alice's husband in the first half of the twentieth century, it has passed from her to Sandra to Richard Walker. The rooms are privy to so many things - love, lust, anger, betrayal, disease and death. The story flows linearly in the Walker's timeline, while in that of Alice and Sandra, it jumps back and forth - as it moves from room to room of the building. The house is as much a protagonist as any other in the story: perhaps more so.***Why has Lauren Oliver created this convoluted structure to tell a story, which, at its heart, is rather simple? For an answer to this question, I would point to the passage quoted at the beginning of the review. The house, with its rooms, is the metaphor around which the narrative hangs - without it, it would fall flat. Each human being, full of multiple rooms in his/ her psyche, some of which are never opened even by the owner, could be seen as a hoary old building through which generations have passed. What good literature does is to open the doors and let the reader in - and discover the wonders (and horrors!) for him/ herself.For all its darkness, this is a book worth reading.

Video review coming!

My first review on this author. According to Lauren Oliver's website "Rooms" is the only adult book she has written. When I first picked up this book, I assumed it was a horror read. It is actually a paranormal, contemporary, family-drama. I listened to this book on audio with a full cast. They did an awesome job. The book is pretty slow, hardly any action. Giving it 4 stars."Rooms" is about a house in Coral River, in a small town, somewhere in the north east. I always assume Maine. Not sure if that is supposed to be the state. In this house, lives two ghosts. They are not your typical "boo" ghosts, in wispy fog forms or fairy orbs. These two ghosts have been absorbed into their surroundings. They are the walls, furniture, pipes and floors. They see everything. Feel everything. In the first couple of chapters, we meet these ghosts, former residents of the house. There is Alice a stay at home mom in a loveless marriage who lived in the house during the second world war. Then there is Sandra "Sandy", who lived in the house in the Ninety's. She never married. She was a loner and an alcoholic. In present day, the house is owned by Richard Walker and eccentric collector. He is the father of two. He was also in a loveless marriage. A theme to this story. Loveless, lonely. His wife, Caroline has been his "Ex" for the last ten years. Caroline hated her husband and Richard...well he didn't understand the resentment. His daughter resented him too, although he didn't understand why. Richard dies in the first chapter, before we meet Caroline and the kids, Minna and Trenton. The Walker survivors, have come to Coral River to sell the things that can be sold. To empty and organize Richards possessions. During the week they are there, each family member in turn, come to terms with their past. With their loss. They realize that they are all hurting in some way. They also realize that the bitterness they have harbored over the years are misplaced. That maybe they weren't seeing clearly, that their memories of the good times have been forgotten.Alice and Sandra are here in the rooms of the house, watching the family drama unfold. While we are learning the Walker's past stories, we also learn about the ghosts. Through their memories, we find out they too were in pain. Pain doesn't go away once you are dead, the memories linger. "But the problem with death was that you could never get tired of it and go home." I found this story to be both engaging and sad. Everyone has a story. No one knows the deepest secrets of our hearts. Sometimes we don't even know. In the case of Alice and Sandra, they had a long period of time to think about those secrets. Not the secrets you keep from others, but the secrets you keep from yourself. Even in death those secrets can eat away at you. "If only bodies were like rooms, and people could pass in and out of them at will." "A single spark was all it took.""Everything comes out in the end."These three quotes sum up the story for me. I did enjoy this read. I wish I would have went in with a different expectation. However the story is written beautifully and I do recommend reading it.

Sandra Wilkinson, born in the 1950s, and Alice Luddell, born at the turn of the 20th century — both long dead — occupy an old manor in Upstate New York. Once ghosts, they’ve so seeped into the house — or, conversely, the house has so percolated into them — that they have now transcended into something more.Patriarch Richard Walker, always overly exacting and promiscuous, has died in the house in Coral River, N.Y., leading his entire family — his dipsomaniacal ex-wife Caroline, his snobby, near-nymphomaniac daughter Minna, his sulking teenage son Trenton, and Minna’s 6-year-old daughter Amy — to descend on the house for the first time in years. Once a blond charmer of a toddler, Trenton, 12 years Minna’s junior, has become a taciturn, self-pitying Phillips Andover junior channeling The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield — castigating his family for lacking “integrity” (read: being phonies). The poor boy is too deluded to even recognize himself as a parody of every intelligent, too-serious, privileged teen since Pip in Great Expectations or George Arthur in Tom Brown's School Days.Needless to say, the return of the Walkers to their homestead will bring about a change to that dysfunctional family — and for the spectral beings, too — in several delicious twists that I won’t spoil. Let’s just say that Rooms isn’t just not your average ghost story, but it’s not your average tale in any way. From the alternating narration to the perspicacious takes on human nature to the poignant moments and the funny ones, author Lauren Oliver weaves a phenomenal story. Amazon’s blurb comparing Rooms to The Lovely Bones and The Ocean at the End of the Lane does a disservice to all three books, which share nothing other than their containing certain paranormal elements and a dream-like quality. (The blurb also compares Rooms to Her Fearful Symmetry, which I haven’t read.) Don’t go into Rooms with any preconceptions — except that of expecting a unique tale uniquely told.Special thanks to Allie for picking this excellent book for our May Buddy Read.

CREEP FACTOR ... raised high in this book. Okay, I live in the south. South Georgia where plantations are still thriving (god, I want one) and the creepy scary ghost tales are still talked about to this day. With this said, I have lived on a documented haunted plantation grounds and really do believe my present house is haunted. So, I totally got the vibe this book was aiming for. Great book.

A haunted house. A ghost story told in seven voices: three of them dead, four still alive. Richard Walker has recently died. His estranged family gather at what was once their home, to organise a funeral and hear his will read. There's Caroline, the mother, Richard's ex-wife, who still secretly loves her husband and has spent the years since their divorce, salving her grief with epic quantities of Vodka. Her twenty-eight year old daughter Minna is almost as damaged: a single mother to six year old Amy, she deadens her misery and disappointment with prescription pills and endless sex; a seamless string of zipless encounters. Minna's sixteen year old brother Trenton is but barely recovered from a near-fatal car crash. Trenton is a shy and terrified psychological mess who cannot help but wonder if he'd be happier if he hadn't survived the accident that came so close to killing him.Three ghosts also live in the Walker house; squabbling and fighting, no love lost between them. There's Alice, her life marred by her abusive husband, married lover, dead baby. And Sandra, another alcoholic; her short life a car crash from miserable beginning to violent end with a bullet in the head and her brains - mythically: everyone in town has a version of the story - spattered across the walls. And now a new ghost has joined their ranks; too new, too traumatised to know who she was and why she's here. And now the police are out looking for a missing girl... Rooms is not really a ghost story: the ghosts don't scare, they're not malevolent and only one of the family can sense them at all. This story is more about the living than the dead: about failure and sadness and regret. Memories are the real ghosts haunting this family. There's no real horror; it's a fast and easy read. Gothic-lite.And four stars, not five. I can't quite bring myself to give it five and trying to put my finger on why. I enjoyed Rooms hugely; the writing is beyond good, but there's something not quite right with the way the story flows. Seven voices is a lot to juggle; Lauren Oliver comes close to pulling it off, but it doesn't quite work. Each time a new character steps forward to tell the tale, the story stops; you need to take a breath, fit yourself into a new skin. Sometimes the change of gear works really well, but often it does not. It's not a make or break point, and for the most part, this novel is really good. The characters feel real, the story is fascinating, but the writing is the best of it, the writing is sublime - ...The house falls into quiet. It is ours again, mine and Sandra's. Its corners are elbows, its stairways our skeleton pieces, splinters of bone and spine.In the quietness, we drift. We reclaim the spaces that Richard colonized. We must regrow into ourselves - clumsily, the way that a body, after a long illness, still moves in fits and shivers.We expand into all five bedrooms. We hover in the light coming through the windows, with the dust; we spin dizzily in the silence. We slide across empty dining room chairs, skate across the well-polished table, rub ourselves against the oriental carpets, curl up in the impressions of old footprints..It is both a relief and a loss to have our body returned to us, intact. We have, once again, successfully expelled the Other.We are free. We are alone...- That's just page 4 and it just gets better and better. The writing is superb throughout, and the story is riveting too.

If you came here expecting a horror story, you will be disappointed. Even though there are ghosts involved in this story, the main focus is not the horror. Except, it's that these ghosts are holding secrets. Secrets about the past. Secrets about what happened. Secrets about the house. "Memory is as thick as mud. It rises up, it overwhelms. It sucks you down and freezes you where you stand. Thrash and kick and gnash your teeth. There's no escaping it." Rooms reminded me a lot of The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling. I could find so many similarities. But the main story is what reminded me of it. It is that the story shows how every character reacts to a certain death, how each characters gets affected.This book is written by Lauren Oliver, and because it is written by her, you should expect many beautiful images and lots of beautiful quotes that will mesmerize you. "All that changed after the rains. For weeks in May the skies opened up, bringing a glut, a gut-spilling onslaught of rain, vomiting leaves onto the windows and driving surfs of mud down the hill and onto the porch and pushing a tunneling rush of water from Lackawanna Creek into the basement." I won't spoil the story, but I found the perspectives in this book very original. You have two ghosts narrating parts of the story, and they're very complex characters. The rest is narrated in third person and focuses on different characters.What I mainly liked in this story was how Oliver portrayed the internal battles. Each character is fighting one. Trenton, Minna, Caroline, and the ghosts. They all are fragile and flawed.Overall, this is Lauren Oliver's first adult novel, and it is a success. She has managed to deviate away from the YA industry in a very fresh and original story. The story will haunt you (pun intended).

Anyone going strictly by the cover might be expecting ghosts and/or a haunted house story and be disappointed. That is probably the only way one can be disappointed by this amazing book. It does in fact have ghosts, takes place in a house and it is haunting, but in a way that's neither paranormal nor supernatural, but all too human. It's sad, profound and incredibly moving, the interconnected lives struggling to genuinely connect, to understand each other, to matter. Above all, it's a story about the most basic of human conditions, loneliness, and the way it haunts in this life and the next. Absolutely stunning writing, emotionally intelligent, very impressive adult fiction debut of a YA author. One can only hope it won't be the last, although YA has got to be more lucrative. And if all the thoughts of loneliness sadden you, just remember C.S. Lewis said that we read to know we are not alone. All you need is a good book. Like this one. Highly recommended.

Todo lo que hace esta mujer es magia para mí. Ya está. Es así. Es que no hay más vueltas que darle. Lauren I love you so much it hurts GIMME MORE BOOKS NOW.

This read way differently than any of Lauren Oliver's other work. I really liked this approach to "ghosts."

'Rooms' is about a house and everyone who lives in that house - the living, the barely living and the no-longer living. Richard Walker dies and his ex-wife, Caroline and his children, Minna and Trenton, and Minna’s daughter, Amy arrive at his home in Coral River to settle his affairs. The ghosts, Alice and Sandra, ache in the crevices of the house, adjusting to the invasion, hiding old secrets and witnessing the beginnings of others.Everybody in 'Rooms' is damaged. Caroline is a barely functioning alcoholic. Minna tries to drown out her unhappy childhood and abuse with promiscuous, self-destructive behaviour. Trenton is depressed and suicidal after being involved in a terrible accident. Alice and Sandra don’t speak about their tragic histories as they torment each other with their different personalities. Everybody in the house has to confront lost dreams and betrayals, as well as their feelings of grief and guilt that are tied up in the history of the house.Oliver is a good writer. Her characters are interesting, flawed and absolutely believable. Her subtle change of tenses is interesting and effective. She uses present tense when she is in the ghosts’ viewpoints and past tense in the living character’s viewpoints. The tension in the atmosphere of the house is excellent. You don’t have to like ghost stories to enjoy this book. It is much more than a ghost story.