Word: reader
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...what truly involves the reader with Jake is O'Nan's arresting use of second person. "You like it like this, the bright languid days," the narrator instructs immediately. The reader watches Friendship through Jake's eyes; he smells death through Jake's nose. He contemplates hell through Jake's fears...
...this novel. With every question resolved and yet still looming, with every horror extinguished and yet still ringing, the narrator in Stewart O'Nan's A Prayer for the Dying is left only to accept his own futile insanity. Carried on a probing journey of terror and tenderness, the reader is confronted directly with his own mortality, his own anxieties, his own powerlessness...
...read the first paragraph four times, allowing ample time for the luscious, vivid imagery to soak through my bones. But the intensity of the novel is apparent from the beginning: the heat and weight of the lazy summer mood push the edges and demand release. From the beginning, the reader feels the hidden furnace of madness churning and knows instinctively that, if all is so plodding and weary to start, something dramatic must be brewing...
According to O'Nan, the second person was originally just used for "bad guys...But people aren't bad. They're just very questioned. This guy is good. It brings the reader closer to him. He will sacrifice anything." O'Nan recognized the abruptness of his style but felt the overall intensity and involvement was worth confusing his reader for the first 30 pages. The reader's discomfort and anxiety concerning the epidemic are profoundly enhanced by the voice, by his lack of freedom of thought. His thoughts are Jake's, so just as Jake is helpless against the disease...
...author Rowling--Jo to her friends--has conjured up a magical, self-contained parallel universe that looks a lot like a British boarding school except that Harry takes classes in potions, poltergeists patrol the halls, and Harry gets to show his true mettle. "I know far more than the reader will ever need to know," says Rowling, an elfin-looking 33-year-old. "I know the names of all the Quidditch teams." Quidditch, for the uninitiated, is sort of like soccer, but it is played in the air on broomsticks, and some of the balls attack the players...