Three Rooms - Jo Hamya

 

Genre: Literary Fiction

Release Date: Expected 8th July 2021

Eight months ago, a young woman began her life - moving into her renting university living space and ready to start her new job as a research assistant at Oxford. All around her, she can feel the energy from the previous residents who became leaders and pioneers - and it almost doesn't feel like real life at all.

But now everything is different - she's sleeping on a strangers sofa in London, temping at a magazine and things don't appear to be getting better. She's no closer to a stable job or home, she's overworked and underpaid, and the world around her is falling apart - Brexit is dividing the nation, Grenfell tower burned, the city is rife with homelessness and despair and the climate is changing beyond repair. And as every day passes by, she begins to question what this is all really for. 

Our nameless, faceless narrator was cold and detatched - an almost clinic approach to storytelling that made me feel like an observer to a social experiment rather than a reader. Three Rooms had a strange monotony and boredom throughout - the kind that makes your stomach ache and it felt uncomfortably familiar. The entire book read like a stream of thoughts, but with very long strings of text with no pauses for air or punctuation which at times was not enjoyable but didn't detract too much.

Hamya has captured the despair and nihilism of young people who feel like their futures are devoid of hope - even our nameless narrator may seem on the surface like she's fine, working for a society magazine and living in the capital city - but even her life is barely held together and being pulled apart by the world we are living in. 

Three Rooms was a darkly uncomfortable truth about the complexities of class, race, politics and the thousands of things that make our identity. 

RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thank you to Jo Hamya, Random House UK and NetGalley for this ARC in return for an honest review.