The Moon is Down: Engaging the Audience

This novel was very interesting and engaging to read.  It was so for many reasons.  It was suspenseful, it was somewhat mysterious, and it was serious.  These factors all helped the audience read on to find out the conclusion of the novel.

The suspense in the novel was always lingering on every page.  With each chapter, you learned more about what was going on, but not too much to spoil what would happen next.  One great example of when suspense was used was when Tonder visited Molly Morden the second time.  You knew that she was thinking about murdering him when she hid the scissors, but the audience was not quite sure if she would go through with it.  However, you did not learn the outcome of this event until the next chapter, when other soldiers were talking about how Tonder should have steered clear of women and stayed stronger.  You also learn from Corell later that Molley escaped town with the help of the mayor and had not been caught.   This suspenseful event made the audience keep reading so they would know how this event would unfold.  Suspense is such a great addition to a book because suspense is vital to a story.  If the audience does not wonder what the outcome is, there is not point to even read the book! The main reason a person reads a book is to get to the end and to know how everything concludes, so a book without suspense might as well be unread.

Another great hook to the novel was that it was kind of mysterious.  The leader of this army was never revealed.  I thought that this was a good addition to the novel because the mystery helped the reader keep an imagination about what the leader could have been like.  It could be a person from history, or it could be a character you made up in your mind.  Whatever you imagined, it is a sure thing that it made the book easier and more interesting to read.  Mystery is a great way to engage readers because it helps the reader stay imaginative and focused on the story line.

One last technique Steinbeck used to catch readers attentino was the seriousness of the story.  Steinbeck made no effort to make this novel anything but serious.  He chose a serious topic, he made serious characters with serious emotions.  This serious mood made the readers involved more deeply in the story because they could focus on the events better.  Serious tone helps the author get the point across and also makes no room for unimportant details.  The serios mood of the book engaged readers in a different way.  It made the audience think that they should keep going with the book because the lesson would actually be fufilling because this book is legitimately serious.  The engaging technique of seriousness may  not seem like the best, but for classic novels it seems to be a popular way to keep audiences engaged in the story.

Steinbeck, John. The Moon Is Down. New York: Penguin Classics, 1942. Print.