Module 9 Review - The Humming Room

The humming room / by Ellen Potter.

Bibliographic Citation:

Potter, E. (2012). The humming room. New York, NY: Feiwell and Friends.

Summary:

After her dad and his girlfriend are murdered, Roo finds herself to be an orphan. After a time in foster care, she is shipped off to live with an uncle she didn’t know she had who lives in an old children’s hospital on a lonely island. Roo is given a room in the west wing of the house and told to stay out of the east wing. She doesn’t meet her uncle until the day after she arrives, but he shows very little interest in her.

Always a loner who never felt alone, in her new home with an uninterested uncle and staff that mostly leave her be, she finds herself lonely and beginning to hear eerie noises and humming coming from another room in the west wing. A teacher / caretaker is brought in to school Roo and follow her wherever she goes. In her search for a break, she finds a little hidey-hole under a rock and hides from her teacher for hours, falling asleep and waking up the next morning to find that her teacher had been fired for losing her.

Roo goes back to her exploring to determine the source of the humming and finds a hidden garden 

that is close to death. Roo decides she will save the garden and begins toting water up from the river. Jack, known as The Faigne because he lives on the river and comes and goes like a ghost, befriends her and offers to help her restore the garden.

One night, Roo wakes up to screaming and in her search for the source finds a boy, her cousin Phillip, who has been confined to his room since the death of his mother. Phillip is rich, spoiled and weak because of his self-confinement. When he doesn’t get his way, he responds by acting out. When he is calm, Roo spends time with him and finds that her uncle built the hidden garden for his wife, Phillip’s mother, and then destroyed it after she died. One day, Roo takes Phillip to see the garden, which he hadn’t seen since his mother died, and he began to feel a sense of peace. Roo’s uncle was upset when he found out that Roo had taken Phillip to the garden, but was amazed when he saw it flourishing again and that it was helping Phillip with his grief, the reason for his self-confinement.

Impressions:

Roo has been a loner with no real authority for a long time. When she gets to her uncle’s house, the staff is continually threatening to send her back to foster care because of her lack of obedience. The eerie noises beckon to Roo, begging her to find them and despite the warnings, she cannot stay away.

I think this book has the right amount of mystery/suspense and adventure to draw young readers in and keep them interested. While it does mention Roo's dad's drug use and the subsequent murders of him and his girlfriend, the detail is minimal. Roo is full of sass, grit and determination and the reader gets wrapped up in Roo's aloneness, her search for the eerie noises, and her desire for human/familial connection. 

Library Use Suggestions:

Read aloud parts of the book such as when Roo is searching for the humming and have students make predictions about what is causing the humming. Discuss why her uncle might be away all the time and why her cousin is confined to a hidden room.

Do you have a place that you like to go to be alone, that makes you feel safe? Where is it and why did you choose it?

Reviews:

A young orphan finds herself in a remote mansion that hides many secrets.
Roo’s childhood has been traumatic; she is ill-fed, ill-clothed and too small for her age. She spends much of her time hiding in cavelike spaces, with her ear to the ground listening intensely to the movements within the Earth. When her drug-dealing parents are killed, she is sent to live with an uncle on an isolated island—Cough Rock—in the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York. The local inhabitants are earthy and superstitious and seem to hark back to an earlier time. Her uncle stays away for months at a time. A newly discovered cousin screams and cries and rarely leaves his room. There is also a mysterious, long-neglected garden that calls to her. The characters and events are nearly exact counterparts to those found in the classic The Secret Garden. Potter intentionally evokes the earlier work, capturing its bittersweet emotions and fey qualities. But it is not a clone in modern dress. The author has created a fresh tale with a strong-willed heroine. Though Jack is no Dickon, Roo might be more likable than Mary Lennox.            
An homage to a cherished classic that can work as a companion piece or stand alone as a solid, modern tale for young readers in the 21st century.

(2011, December 15). [Review of The humming room]. Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ellen-potter/humming-room/