Thank you to NetGalley and Mariner Books for an advanced electronic copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

This book follows a young woman renting a room in Oxford on her journey to have a place of her own, both to live physically and in the world metaphorically.

Admittedly, I stopped reading about 18% through. I found that I was struggling to care about the main character, as she seemed so dull. Her story didn't interest me. I think this is okay as a concept but it would help if the main character had a clear purpose that you could recognize in their words and actions. Instead, it's kinda like... why should I care about this character?

I found the writing style really interesting. At times, though, it was quite repetitive. I think it was like that on purpose, to show how life can be repetitive, but I just felt that it slowed the book down a bit. I did enjoy the second half better and read it a lot quicker than the first half. As a side note- the main character is nameless and it personally took me a while to get used to that but that might just be because I've never read a book with a nameless main character before.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

This novel was not for me. I couldn't get past the 'literary' style (e.g. 'I wanted to work with the dichotomy of things: the constant present tense of the house, and the vision I had of myself, unpacked, future perfect'. The narrator concludes that living like that is exhausting - I find reading writing like that exhausting.) Also, the street in Oxford is St Giles, not Giles Street.

DNF around 20%. I thought the cover, title, and description were cool and that is what drew me in. However, the writing style was just not for me.

1.5 stars, rounded down. The blurb seemed like it might be an interesting addition to other literary fiction pieces I’ve recently read focusing on millennial issues and ennui. In reality, this is a mix of autofiction (which I tend to dislike), highbrow writing, and tons of UK politics (of which I am unfamiliar) - all making this pretty insufferable to get through. There were a few really beautiful lines sprinkled in the ramblings of class and social media (I’ll drop one or two below), yet even those are not enough to bring this up to 2-stars as I really didn't enjoy my time with this. Hard pass! But cool cover.

“… the privilege of a place can depend on the absence of the wrong body as much s the presence of the right one.”

“What else did anyone with comfortable enough means ever really do, except look at the news and accept the circumstances of the world so long as they did not interfere with the general course of what it took to live a life?”

“The push alerts came, blooming kiss upon kiss, in oblong waves not omy home screen. The way apps moved had a lightness, an aerodynamics to them: they hovered, hung, bobbed in and out of view.”

“Before calling my mother, I was an unhappy, failing adult. After calling my mother, I was an unhappy, failing child.”

I voluntarily obtained a digital version of this book free from Netgalley and Mariner Books in exchange for an honest review.

The unnamed narrator of this slim novel set in 2018 just wants a room of her own. I know. She's a university grad who hasn't been able to find long term appropriate employment (not sure what that would be for her) or a place to live. Then there's Brexit. While I suspect others might enjoy it, I found it typical of the recent trend of disaffected nameless characters in novels which don't have a real plot line. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. A pass from me.

When starting Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms, I thought I would love it. In my twenties, I was in position similar to the unnamed narrator’s, but at a high-ranking American university. The narrator’s lack of a name made her somewhat of an Everyman--or, in this case, an Every-twenty-something woman. However, much as I failed to identify with Holden Caulfield’s teenage angst in Catcher in the Rye when I read Salinger’s novel as a teenager, I failed not only to identify with Hamya’s narrator, but also to become very interested in her or in any of the lesser characters in the book. Perhaps that is the point; perhaps the social comment is more important than the characters.

Clearly, some reviewers enjoyed Three Rooms, and Hamya can write well although her writing style is not for me. Ultimately, although I like many types of novels, I suspect I am too old for this one although the author’s satiric humor sometimes amused me. For example, although the narrator hopes to find a real (non-student) job someday and be able to afford her own flat/apartment, the post-doctoral student across the hall cannot understand her desire to leave academia in favor of a “real world” job. “The academic market will be oversaturated for a while,” he rationalizes, “But if they keep driving tuition prices up, in a generation or two, we might stand a chance. We’ll just have no one to teach.” His optimism about being hired for a faculty position in a generation or two speaks volumes about the hopelessness of these students’ situation. I responded similarly to the narrator’s oft-repeated two-word sentence “I worked.” Readers do not learn about her work although her post-doctoral position is her reason for being at Oxford, at least on the surface. Instead of descriptive details, the sentence is followed by seemingly random happenings, and I started to understand she is at Oxford simply because she has nowhere else to go—no “real world” job opportunities.

When the narrator attends her first Oxford party, she encounters a young woman named Ghislane whose main interest was getting the narrator connected with her on Instagram. Indeed, Ghislane’s function in the novel seems to be to represent a shallow 21st-century type whose reason to exist involves imposing herself on a series of places in the photos of her Instagram feed, not caring about anything else. Although the infamous Ghislaine Maxwell attended Oxford, the contemporary setting indicates that the slight variation on the given name could be no more than a bit of fun.

Again, I see Hamya painting a satiric portrait of contemporary life as her narrator moves from academia to copyediting and then back home with her parents. As a former Oxford student of contemporary literature and culture and a former copy editor, Hamya appears to have drawn, to some degree, upon her own experiences. I admire her ability to turn life into fiction.

Ultimately, however, nameless characters, lack of quotation marks for dialogue, and the repeated harping on various forms of social media and on Brexit bother me. As a retired English professor, I am baffled by any writer’s choice to omit quotation marks; Hamya is not the only contemporary novelist to choose to do so. I may be old-fashioned, but I see no reason to abandon this convention. As an American, I am certainly aware of Brexit but apparently not informed enough to understand fully all the nuances and ramifications in the narrator’s mind although my Google search helped somewhat.

Three Rooms surely has its proper audience; unfortunately, I am not a member. I suspect Three Rooms is much cleverer than I can appreciate, and I hope it finds its way into the right hands.

Thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the advance reader copy.

A new adult story of finding oneself and developing identity in your twenties, personally and professionally. An innovative introspection from a young narrator trying to find her way.

Three Rooms follows an unnamed, twenty-something narrator as she struggles to find her footing professionally and domestically. As the title suggests, she lives in three rooms over the course of the year, starting off in shared accommodation during a position as a research assistant at Oxford. She then moves to London and rents a sofa while working as a copy editor at a glossy magazine. Finally, she moves home to her parents. As she moves through these spaces Brexit negotiations, the steady flow of Twitter-streams and the general bustle of urban existence crackles in the background.

Three Rooms is timely and sharp, and our narrator dispenses with one astute observation after the other, with an incredibly droll tone of voice. At time I was humming with laughter – Hamya has captured some of the more pompous and navel-gazing areas of academic circles with such precision, I couldn't help but chuckle. Other points left me seething - opportunistic landlords with overpriced rentals and employers with, what in my eyes constitute, borderline predatory employment practices are two areas of our day and age which I find increasingly intolerable.

Now, that said... our narrator is at times an irksome storyteller. She is certainly sharp, but she is so disillusioned with her circumstance – for someone who is so, in no uncertain terms, incredibly privileged, and furthermore so pensive, it is jarring that she ha such limited self-awareness. I also found those around her to be insufferable - I think this may be the first book I have enjoyed while simultaneously disliking every single person in it. While I very much appreciate that they called her out on some of her BS, I found them to be so abrupt at times, that I found myself getting annoyed on her behalf.

Overall, Three Rooms was a pleasure, and offers a perspective that will resonate with many. I think Hamya writes incredibly well and has a keen understanding of contemporary life and the challenges that many young people face today. I look forward to whatever she writes in the future.

This book started out with a lot of potential however I feel like it fell flat about half-way through and never really regained its footing

Three Rooms tells the story of an unnamed narrator who moves from a rented apartment during her time as a research assistant in Oxford, to someone's couch while temping at a magazine. She moves back home when her contract isn't renewed, left to grapple with the reality that she may never be able to afford a room of her very own.
-
Jo Hamya writes with a quick tongue reminiscent of Emma Jane Unsworth (Grown Ups). I felt like I was being lovingly skewered as she acknowledged the difficulties millennials and younger generations have run into trying to carve out a place in the world where wages have stagnated but the price of everything else, has not.
-
In the author's note Hamya says Three Rooms is about withholding capital, principally domestic and financial - a gut punch that should make housed people think twice about their living situation being a guarantee.
-
If this is her debut at just 24, I really can't wait to see what's next.

This was a very truthful look at a young professional's journey to trying to find a stable job and home. I connected very much with the main character and the difficulties she experienced feeling stable in a capitalist society that is making it harder and harder for the younger generation. The writing was sometimes a little too formal which made you feel a little detached to the protagonist and you could feel that the author was trying to put her point across rather than making us just see it for ourselves. Overall, still an enjoyable read and I'm curious to see future publications from this author.

I’ve been loving reading more literary fiction along with my Rom Coms this summer. I tend to go back and forth between the two genre-wise. My latest Literary Fiction is Three Rooms by Jo Hamya - and I really enjoyed it. In theory, Three Rooms should be a book that gets a 5-star rating from me, It has everything I love theme-wise - including my recent interest in unnamed protagonists. I also have a “useless” set of degrees in the humanities which society loves to remind me is “necessary” anymore so I felt that connection. But there were still a few things that frustrated me about the book - we will get to that!

Three Rooms focuses on our unnamed protagonist - it’s 2018 and she has moved into a rented room in order to begin her job as a research assistant at Oxford. Our protagonist is a POC graduate student and lacking a name it makes her more relatable in a way, but it also causes a struggle as she lacks a personality and appearance making her a basic millennial who can easily get lost in the generational stereotypes.

The way Hamya writes about academia and the world it encompasses is truly amazing. She is able to successfully explain its positives while also explaining to outsiders how incredibly frustrating it can be. While I enjoyed her writing, I did find it to be very highbrow and overly literary - if that makes sense. It felt like she was trying to explicitly put the concept of literary fiction and style over the actual character development. There is no question the writing is dense at points and that can for sure be a turn-off for some readers where the content could have been explained in a more simple manner. In a way, its different formating can cause confusion - lack of quotation marks and paragraph breaks. Although it is kind of the opposite, the first book that comes to mind for me is Luster by Raven Leilani from last year.

Interestingly enough - the plot of this book takes place in two rooms rather than three. and that is something that bugged me slightly!

As an academic, I really did enjoy the descriptions of the world as I feel it is either romanized or made the villain. Despite my negative feedback here, I do think this novel has a great set of feet to stand on. I would rate it a 3.75/5 stars and I do think others should read it and give it a try.

In Three Rooms we follow an unnamed narrator from a life in academia to life in the corporate world. The plot is almost non-existent, instead the author uses the book as a vehicle to discuss various more recent and current issues (brexit, capitalism’s effect on workers’ rights, renting vs. owning your home, the influence of social media and technology just to name a few). In theory this book, which at its core is about the millennial angst of a 20 something-year-old going through everyday life, should have been right up my street. In reality, however, I often struggled to find the real purpose or meaning behind parts of the book as the author went off on tangents that seemingly had no connection to the rest of the text, or maybe I was just not able to pick up on the subtext.

Thank you to Netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sending me an advanced copy.

When I read the synopsis of this book, I thought it would be right up my alley. Lately, I've been drawn to books with narrators who are at a pivotal point in their lives, trying to make it in a world that has steadily been making it harder to do so. The unnamed narrator of Three Rooms is struggling to find her place in the world. She's been educated at a fine university, and she has a job as a research assistant in the English department at Oxford University. She has dreams of having a place and room of her own, but despite her prestigious degree, she's been unable to realize that dream. She looks around at her peers and feels like she's behind, that she has not been afforded the same privileges as other people her age. While this all seems highly relatable to many millennials, there was a lot left to be desired from Hamya's novel.

One of the most glaring things that hindered my enjoyment of this book was the main character herself. She is supposedly down bad and broke, but she's had so many opportunities that plenty of people would kill for. She's an assistant researcher (albeit temporarily) at Oxford for Christ's sake! She is able to live quite cheaply in university housing, complete with a maid. She spends most of her time lamenting Brexit and feeling like she's not making much progress in her life, which is understandable, but she doesn't really take advantage of what's in front of her. She's privy to the upper echelons of UK academia, but she doesn't take advantage of that fact. At the very first event of the school year, she doesn't even try to network at the faculty and student party then complains for the rest of the semester about how she hasn't met anyone or doesn't have any connections! She would feel offended when her housemate would tell her about how she comes off to other people, but she didn't really do anything to combat that. She envied the things that she resented her colleagues for having easy access to, which is valid, but she also benefitted from them despite her insistence that she was down and out.

I also did not enjoy the heavy use of social media in this book. A few mentions of it to make a point about reality vs perception among other things is okay, but to include it ad nauseum was a little bit much. It did firmly cement the story in the present day, but I feel like at times it was excessive.

Overall I liked the examination of millennial success and lack thereof, but the execution was way more pretentious than it needed to be.

This is not the best I’ve read, but certainly has potential. I think a better editor with some more changes would have made this a much better book. Felt for the character, but did lose focus after a while.

So, good, but not great. A draft, more then a book. It’s close though.

Thank you for the ARC from NetGalley and Author Jo Hamya

I didn’t get the gist of this book. As I continued to plow through it it never made much sense to me. I didn’t really care for any of the characters. I finished the book but asked myself what did I just read. This book was a complete miss for me.

This was an interesting book in the sense that attempts to bring together so many experiences of being a younger person within the cultural and societal contexts of today, and while there many witty and honest expressions, I found myself drifting away quite a bit. I wasn't very drawn in and that might just be the writing style, which tends to seem more like essays rather than a novel.

This book was really hard for me to finish, despite it being a short one. My least favorite thing in books is when the author doesn't use quotations for dialogue.

With that being said, I can respect the premise of the story as we've all been there.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for this book in exchange for an honest review.

This novel felt like a self-indulgent, badly written autofiction to me. Would work a lot better as a short collection of essays. The narrative ‘tone’ didn’t work for me. I appreciate the writer trying to explore the political/societal issues/ideas in the novel, but most of it felt too dated and underdeveloped. But most of all, it didn’t blend in well with the characters’ stories/lives. It felt unconvincing, and it was hard to feel anything for any of the characters. It felt discordant, like badly made music. This made the narrator/protagonist even more unbearable as if they’ve just made being ‘woke’ their personality – which then makes them borderline being unbearably pretentious.