Outside Reading - post #5...Done!

After answering all of the required questions for my outside reading blog posts, I am going to write my fith and final blog post about my favorite parts of the novel, Halfway House. The very first few sentences of the book start out as, “Nights, the girl came and stood at the edge of the yard. From inside his unlit kitchen Pieter Voorster could just make out her dark shape, bulky in a parka, beneath the oak. A car passed, a sweep of headlights. Hoarfrost covered the grass, and for a moment the girl flared into relief, dark against the silver lawn like the negative of a photograph” (1). Just with those few lines, I already have a clearly detailed image in my mind and a beginning sense of the book’s mood. The first scene of the book also ties in with the last scene of the book which ties up all the loose ends in the novel. Everything is as it should be.

In the last scene, Luke is outside the house taking a moment to reflect, “He stood motionless under the oak, trying to see his house as a stranger might: solid and unremarkable, small squares of lights where a man and a woman separately began the day. He wanted to hold on to the feeling of suspension; there was something he almost understood, seeing his life from the outside like this” (365). In the beginning scene of the book, a random girl is standing outside the house looking up into Luke’s second-floor window. The girl has an obsessively mad crush on Luke and stalks his every move. In the end of the book, it’s as if Luke is seeing his life for that brief moment through the eyes of Kristen, the crazed stalker. From begining to end, the characters make a full circle and end up where they started much more prepared for what life has in store for them in the “circle of life” (The Lion King).