Summer Assignment #3 (7/23)

This hook that I thought effectively grabbed the reader's attention, is found near the beginning:

 

"***HERE IS A SMALL FACT***

You are going to die.

 

 

 

 

I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me."(3)

 

 

 

     So you have read the hook and now you have made your own opinions about it already, regardless of what I write here. So I'm not going to try and persuade you that this is a good hook, only that I think it is. What I am going to do is tell you the background to the quote/hook.

 

     The speaker is Death, if you haven't read my other summer assignment posts yet, and he's very sarcastic in his narration of the story. The book really focuses on what life means and how it matters. The how it matters to the people around you part is especially well hit on by the emphasis put on it by Death. He puts this emphasis on it by throughout the story, telling the reader how each person died, but in an oddly descriptive way. No, he doesn't tell the gory details if they died from war, but his details are focused more on the victims last moments of life as opposed to their first without. He talks about how they were feeling before they died, and how peaceful they were, and often tells what they were thinking about (if they were awake). I don't want to spoil the ending, but some people die suddenly close to Liesel and it has a very almost overemphasized peacefulness part to the description of the story by Death. That is how this hook ties in with the whole book and how the last line somewhat foreshadows the conclusion.