Jacksonġ.After a number of highly acclaimed New York Times bestsellers, including the Delirium trilogy and the standalone novels Before I Fall and Panic, Lauren Oliver returns with a spellbinding tale that confirms her place as one of our finest storytellers. Dancing at the Pity Party – Tyler Federġ5. Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute – Talia Hibbertġ7. The Taking of Jake Livingston – Ryan DouglassĢ1. We Weren’t Looking to Be Found – Stephanie KuehnĢ7. It is a story about secrets, regrets and finding a way to forgive – yourself and others. Rooms is a family drama and a ghost story. The past would come along with you, whether you asked for it or not. …they were just rooms, many of them empty and thus unfamiliar, like the rooms of a stranger’s house. “It’s corners are elbows, its stairways our skeleton pieces, splinters of bone and spine.” Trenton takes a different view. I’ve shared the house with him for long enough.” Alice wins, remarking “Richard Walker does not die at home. While Richard was still alive, Sandra and Alice took bets about where he would die.

There’s more than one story to be told here, and the ghosts want their fair share of the limelight. She had lied to everyone for so long, Trenton wasn’t even sure she knew the difference anymore. He longs for someone in his family to tell the truth.Įveryone in his family lacked integrity. He is virtually friendless and has recently been in an accident (the details of which are revealed slowly), which has left him physically damaged. Trenton has clearly had a difficult time, too. Minna is caustic towards Trenton and indifferent toward her daughter. The Walker children don’t seem to have happy post-divorce memories of their father. He was the most beautiful child….” She can’t quite believe that the “absurdly tall, skinny adolescent, with the sullen look and dingy-dark hair” who stumbles into the house all these years later is the same boy. Alice has tender feelings towards Trenton, who she remembers as a young child claiming that “For years, I’ve longed to see Trenton. Sandra and Alice, in particular, are trapped by their memories, which Sandra claims are “thick as mud.” These two women watch the Walker family stumble around with varying degrees of affection and distaste. Mostly they are stories of loss and dysfunction. The house is inhabited by two ghosts: Sandra and Alice.Īll of these characters have stories to tell. Richard, Charlotte’s ex and the children’s father, has died and now it’s been left to them to pick up the pieces. They aren’t alone. They’ve returned to the house they once called home to pack things up. Rooms is the story of the Walker family, alcoholic mother Charlotte twenty-something Minna, her single-mother daughter, and Amy, her granddaughter and Trenton, her awkward teenage son. Lauren Oliver is well-known in the YA fiction world, but Rooms is her first novel for adults…although the distinction hardly matters, really.

Rooms by Lauren Oliver