A short, beautiful novel about being a young person in present-day England. It is sparse, and short, but it packs a profound punch. Hamya's auto-fiction is exciting and her look on what items to fid a place of one's own in their twenties (in all different ways) left me moved.

General/Political Fiction.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t gel with this book. I was unable to connect or understand what it was supposed to be about - all I took from it was a woman who lived in London and worked in a bookshop and didn’t have any money.
It would be unfair for me to rate this book as I don’t feel I was fully immersed.

I very much enjoyed this story. It was wonderfully written. I look forward to the author’s next book!

Although this book gave me a bit of anxiety, I could not put it down. It was a good read, a little slow for me in some parts but nonetheless, I enjoyed it. I am not sure I would recommend it. It read like an auto fiction book to me. Some parts felt a little too unconvincing.

This book took me a while to get used to. I am trying to wrap my head around the concept of living in three locations and the symbolisms and tie ins with that. I wasn't vested in the story. I tried. And I tried. And I tried. I just couldn't get myself into feeling for the protagonist. I considered a DNF but sometimes you never know what you are missing out. I found the book and concept fuzzy at best and it just wasn't my cup of tea.

“…you know, in no small way, the privilege of a place can depend on the absence of the wrong body as much as the presence of the right one”

Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms is full of knock-the-wind-out-of-you sentences like the above. Pointed and genuine, this book is an excellent and thought-provoking musing on Millennial malcontent with the world before us and the ensuing futility in structures, like higher education, that were put in place to advance some put not all of us.

Publication Date: August 31, 2021

Thank you to @NetGalley and @Marinerbooks for the ARC and audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

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The format of the book was off. Found the story very boring and only got about 15% in. I kept drifting off while readying and could not get into the story or character.

A slim and quick read on the sad life of the modern millennial. Extremely well-written but not particularly enthralling and not much new to say. 3.5 stars rounded to 4. Thanks to NetGalley for the free ARC

I had a little trouble getting into this one. I was completely uninterested and unimpressed with Part 1. I struggled to get through it and almost gave up at this point. I gave it a chance and Part 2 caught my interest a little more and kept me reading. Part 3 was short, but wrapped up the book nicely and left me feeling sorry for the young woman, because this part is congruent with how a lot of millennials end up moving back with their parents.

Set just pre-Brexit Britain , this millennial novel is sharp and well written but didn’t quite land for me. It opens with an epigraph from Virginia Woolf’s ‘Room of one’s own” which links to ‘Three Rooms’ of the title. The unnamed protagonist doesn’t have grand ambitions, she just wants to be able to afford her own place. A rented room in Oxford, a sofa in a friends flat, and back at her parents, are where she finds herself, as she struggles to find her place in the world, in the workplace, in society. It’s pessimistic, political and well observed, but think what I was missing was character. All opinions and reactions, I wanted something more. But I’ll definitely read this author again…

Thanks to Netgalley and Mariner Books the ebook. Over the course of a year we follow a young woman from Oxford to London to, the unthinkable, back home to her parents. Played out against a soundtrack of Brexit, Boris Johnson and Grenfell Tower, she moves away from academia to temp editing a society magazine, knowing that she has it better than most, but is living on a couch the best that her generation can do? An updated A Room of One’s Own where politics and race never seem to fade into the background.

This was an interesting and thoughtful read. Over the course of one year, the main character is on the search for a room, or place to live, and we see her journey from a room she rents at the university where she works, a sofa within a run down apartment she rents, and finally her return to her childhood home when she can no longer afford to live in the city. Through this journey, we learn more about the challenges the main character faces in supporting herself, as she questions whether a financially stable future is in the cards for her and other similarly situated members of her generation.

The author poses many interesting questions about the modern economy and what security means. Recommended!

I enjoyed this book overall, the writing was great but the tone of the book I did not fully connect with. I appreciate this voice but not sure if it was my favourite. I enjoyed the millennial “trying to find her way in the world” plot but it was a bit all over the place for me. I would definitely try another one of Jo Hamya’s books in the future, though!

I enjoyed the first few chapters of this book but then the story became, for me, trivial and meaningless, the characters unlikeable. The free-form style didn't help although I suppose it emphasized the mindset of many members of this generation. I do quite often enjoy novels written from the point of view this generation (Sally Rooney's books are wonderful) so it was more than that...
Thankyou to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance review copy.

I DNF"d this about 60 or so pages in. I really wanted to love it but the tone and writing style seems like it's trying so hard that it ends up feeling very pretentious. Which is sad because I really enjoy the premise. Ended up giving me bad Ali Smith vibes from the attempt at the social commentary in Britain after the Brexit vote. Who knows I might come back to this one and give it another chance but right now it's really not what I wanted to be reading.

Somewhere between 3 - 3.5 rounded down

Jo Hamya's debut is a slim and slippery novel, hard to describe and define. We meet the unnamed when she is teaching at Oxford University and living in a small room in a shared house, later following her to an unstable copy editing position at a glossy magazine in London where she sleeps on another young woman's sofa. Finally she takes in an exhibition at the Tate before moving back in with her parents. These make up the 'three rooms' of the novel, which seems to have taken some inspiration from Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

This is another book which falls into the Brexit era of British fiction, featuring a protagonist struggling with many issues which face her fellow millennials: an unstable job and property market and a 'useless' degree amid a tumultuous economy and political climate. I found the unnamed protagonist and her internal thoughts to be wholly relatable and realistic, but have to admit to finding the middle section (on the second room) a bit frustrating. That said, I'd be interested to see what Hamya writes next and will likely pick up her next novel.

Three Rooms is a thoughtful and observant book. It doesn't hesitate to address the state of the world from a general perspective while also from that of a young person who is challenged to fit into it. I found the writing to be insular and reflective, but overall it didn't really click with me in the way that the synopsis had me hoping it would.

This was a DNF for me, as I got about a quarter in and found it pretty much unbearable. This book feels very self-indulgent and hoity toity—the narrator is unnamed, and it very much feels like stream-of-consciousness, which I have never gelled well with. There were no quotation marks, and the book jumps all over the place. From what I’ve read, it’s pretty plotless—the little plot there is isn’t interesting or important to the book, which leads me to believe the prose itself is supposed to be the hook. I’m not huge into plotless works, so this one was just not for me. I honestly think I could have enjoyed this as a series of short stories, but as a novel, it wasn’t enjoyable.

This was interesting. The author (Hamya) took a spin at Virginia Wolff's and her essay titled "A Room of One's Own." Funnily enough I thought this would resonate with me. I grew up in a packed house with no privacy and had to share a room until I was a pre-teen. And even then, my brothers would kick my door in since my room led upstairs to their bedrooms in the so called attic (it really wasn't an attic. They had huge rooms upstairs (4 of them) our house was a duplex that my parents tore the walls down in between) so I never really had privacy. And then I had a roommate in graduate school and only really had a place of my own when I moved to the DC area. Now I very much need a room or rooms of my own that include lots of books and a garden. That said, this book dragged a lot. The narrator was nameless (which irked me) and the book just follows the narrator through 3 separate rooms during the course of her life from 2018 through present day times which is how we get "Three Rooms" of the title.

Pros: I honestly liked the plot. It made me rethink all of the rooms that I grew up in and lived in that shaped me. I liked following the narrator through her various jobs and the rooms she had to deal with. And you can see how hopeful she was in the beginning and beaten down by the end. You also get a lot of commentary of Brexit in this one as well. We also get into race and class as well.

Cons: The book just drags here and there and it took a while to hold my interest. I was left confused by some of the passages and wondered what emotion was I supposed to be left with as I finished reading. I think that this was really just a semi-autobiography of Hamya's experience so I don't know why she didn't just write this as a non-fiction piece.

I don't think this was the right choice for me. It feels plotless in not a good way. I dnf'd at around 10% Usually, I like this type of novel but I just think I read too many novels that are very similar to this