Would you be able to live in a 11 by 11 room?

The first time I read this book by Emma Donoghue, Room, I speed read it. It is the kind of book that can be speed read. Also, it is the kind of gripping that compels one to speed read through it with a kind of twisting in the gut feel that overwhelms you for the five year old protagonist.
To get the summary out of the way first. Jack is a five year old boy who has always lived in a 11 by 11 room, he has never seen the outside, his only exposure to the world outside is through the television which is on constantly in the Room he shares with his mother. Who we are told is pretty and scared. She has good reason to be. She has been kidnapped and held hostage against her will in a lead and steel encased backyard shelf with a special electronic door code by a man Jack only knows as Old Nick. The story is about how Jack and his mother make a plan to escape Old Nick, how they succeed in their plan and the most painful part of the story, their reintegration back into regular society. For Jack's Mom, a world she is familiar with, a world she has grown up in, until that fateful day when she got pushed into a truck and kidnapped. For Jack though the integration into a world he has never known is much more complex, because he must deal with many more people than just his mother and old Nick. An a vaster, infinite sense of space, compared with the cramped confines of the 11 by 11 room.
When Jack emerges from his incarceration, it suddenly does hit us as readers that this is a malnourished child, a child deprived of sunlight, ergo, with stunted growth. A child who has long hair and skin pale from being indoors for his entire life, and eyes that cannot take the brightness of sunlight, nor skin that can bear being exposed to sunlight. Jack's only references to the world he has now been thrust into is the world of Dora and television he has been exposed to in his entire life in captivity. Not only this, he has spatial perception and other developmental issues having been deprived of social contact through his formative years. Much like the wolf children of myth of legend, the Mowglis and the Tarzans, Jack is a child who has been out in the wilderness, and must retrain himself to adapt to a world which is familiar yet unknown.
The child, his precociousness compounded by the fact that he has grown up with a single adult, is astonishingly adult like in his sense of logic. The characters are built with empathy, the voice of the protagonist, is amazingly adult like and the personification of all the objects in 'Room' create an intimacy with the claustrophobic environment the boy and his mother lived in before their escape. Thankfully, the narrator does not detail any abuse, and the repeated rapes of the mother are implied by creaks of the bedsprings, rather than viewed by the child. While parts of this novel might seem improbable, we do have the real life case of Josef Fritzl to know that truth can inspire fiction.
At the end of the day, this isn't a story about captivity and confinement, and rape and all its horrors. This is the story of a mother's love for her son, and her determination to get them out of the helpless situation they are in. The mother is not perfect, but one has to admire how she has protected her child from her captor, and how she has created a semblance of a scheduled life even in captivity for a child to have a routine to look forward to.
The voice of Jack, who is the narrator of this tale, which does seem older than his age at first, haunts you. And as a mother of a young brat, as I hugged my son to sleep at night, I prayed a little prayer for the untold Jacks in the world today.