The Green Room

Some Prisons Have No Bars

Fiction - Mystery - Historical
247 Pages
Reviewed on 02/04/2021
Buy on Amazon

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    Book Review

Reviewed by Jon Michael Miller for Readers' Favorite

In The Green Room by Janet Sierzant, we meet Dona Pearson who is abducted by an unknown man and held captive in a room painted green in an unknown location. While isolated, communicating with her disguised captor on a computer screen and fed mostly peanut butter sandwiches and coffee, she is sometimes rewarded for her cooperation with a MacDonald’s burger. Her cooperation depends upon her being pleasant and answering her captor’s questions about her views on men, love, and sex. In the meantime, she is trying to figure out who this kidnapper is. Thus, the Green Room is the setting for a review of her love life to determine who this mysterious monster is. Thinking it must be someone she knows, she conducts an internal review of her personal history with men.

As she proceeds, the reader evaluates her accounts to find hints of his identity. Could her abductor be Angelo, her first lover as a teen in New York City? Or Richard whom she marries to live within the hills of North Carolina? Could it be Austin whom she meets in a gym while married to Richard? Or John whom she met after her divorce, or David in Florida? She evaluates the whole scale of views about love, concluding for a while that “love is a scam.” Janet Sierzant kept my attention because the questions she asks herself about relationships are the same questions most of us ask as we venture through our lives with hopes and disappointments in love. We often err because our needs are not met, and we search for that “perfect” relationship—men and women both. Love can easily slide into hate. So, I see The Green Room as a reflection of these profound matters and as a challenging mystery. We must fit together clues to her abductor that we gather from Dona’s intense reminiscences. Ms. Sierzant’s prose is fast-moving and easy to read, her scenes of domesticity masterfully painted, the emotions Dona experiences movingly depicted, and the horrors of unexplained captivity realistically described. Not only women but men have much to gain from The Green Room.

Trudi LoPreto

Dona is just looking for love and happiness, but her journey is long and hard and pretty scary. She divorces her husband who has been unfaithful, moves to Florida, and tries to start her life over. She becomes involved with several different men over time but they all are the same – trying to dominate and control her life. One day she is kidnapped as she gets into her car and wakes up to find herself locked in a room and seeing no one, only getting a beverage and stale food through a slot in the door. The computer in the room is the only communication that she is allowed with a man using a disguised voice. Over many days, they discuss how she has spent her love life and what she really wants from her life. Does she escape this room without being harmed, does someone come to her rescue, is her captor who we think it is? I will not spoil the answers but you will need to read The Green Room yourself to find out.

The Green Room: Some Prisons Have No Bars by Janet Sierzant is an interesting story of Dona Pearson’s life and the terrifying experience she goes through. I found The Green Room to be a bit different than the normal romance and mystery story. It made me stop and think about my life-long decisions and why I made them. Dona was a very complex woman and I was rooting for her to find the happiness she so badly was missing. I changed my mind several times about which man was keeping her locked up but was not sure until it was revealed. The Green Room is a good psychological mystery.

Christopher Anderson

In The Green Room, author Janet Sierzant introduces us to Dona Pearson who majored in Psychology. After leaving work late one night, Dona is abducted and a foul-smelling rag is held over her mouth and nose. When Dona wakes up, she finds herself on a concrete floor in a dark, dank room. As she drifts in and out of consciousness, Dona has the sensation of being lifted up. When she next opens her eyes, she is in a room with its walls painted a putrid green color, with no windows. There are two doors, one of which leads to a toilet and shower. On the dresser is a computer screen. As Dona continues to drift in and out of consciousness, she sees on the computer screen a ski-masked face and hears an electronically enhanced voice using her name. Dona realizes that she must know who her abductor is. Read this fascinating book and see if Dona escapes her captor.

The title of the book, The Green Room, becomes apparent as Janet Sierzant tells the story of Dona Pearson’s abduction. The author takes us into the mind of Dona as she recalls all the people that could possibly be doing this to her. As Dona thinks of the different characters, the reader gets an idea of the possible suspects as she tells you about the different relationships she’s had and the possibilities and mindset of the people that could do such a thing to her. The author writes in a way that keeps you in suspense and also helps you to feel what Dona is feeling; the anxiety, nausea, the fuzzy head, the realization that she must know who it is that is causing her this pain. Overall, a well-written psychological thriller that keeps you wanting to read on to find out if Dona can escape her situation and who is her abductor.