Book review

Title:
Author:
Category (romance, horror, crime, spy, historical, science fiction):
The most important characters:
Summary of the story:
What I liked:
What I disliked:
I do/ do not recommend this book:
Text analysis

Here are some general principles to be considered in the analysis of a piece of writing:

1. Point of view and the form of speech.

The story may be told from the point of view of:
a) the author,
b) the protagonist,
c) an onlooker who may be some minor participant in the action or a person outside
the group of characters.
A story may be told in:
a) direct speech – the characters speaking for themselves,
b) indirect speech – the author describing the thoughts and feelings of his characters,
c) interior monologue.
2. Characterization
a) direct characterization – the author or another person describes the character for
the reader, thus offering his own interpretation of each person in the story;
b) indirect characterization through the action and conversation of the characters.
3. The climax
The moment of the highest interest is called the climax of the story.

Among stylistic devices used by a writer we distinguish syntactic and lexical expressive
means.
 Syntactic expressive means
In stylistic analysis of a piece of writing the structure of sentences is to be taken into
consideration. Sentences may be long or short, simple or complex.
A repetition or reiteration of the same word or phrase in a sentence or sentences usually
lends a peculiar emotional force of emphasis to what is being said. The repetition of the
same syntactical pattern is called parallelism. A word or a phrase repeated at the
beginning of successive clauses is called anaphora, at the end – epiphora.
There are various ways in which the writer can draw the attention of the reader to what
he finds important. Some of them are:
 the use of the verb ‘to do’;
 the structure with the emphatic ‘it’ – it was … that;
 emphatic word order.

Lexical expressive means

 Epithet: an attributive word or phrase expressing some quality of a person, thing
or phenomenon (the author’s individual attitude towards what he describes), e.g. tiny
voice, dead silence, frosty head.
 Simile: an expressive imaginative comparison based on the likeness of two
objects or ideas belonging to different classes (in contrast to a comparison, which
compares things belonging to the same class). The comparison is formally expressed by
the words ‘as’, ‘like’, ‘as if’, ‘such as’ etc.
 Metaphor: an implied imaginative comparison expressed in one word or a
number of words or sentences which expresses our perception of the likeness between
two objects or ideas.
 Metonymy: a figure of speech in which the name of a thing is substituted for
another thing with which it is associated.
 Synecdoche: the whole of something is used to mean the part of it or the part of it
is used to mean the whole.
 Personification: a kind of metaphor in which abstract or inanimate objects are
described as if they were live and animate.
 Paradox: a statement which appears to be contradictory or absurd, but may be
true.
 Oxymoron: a combination of neighbouring words which seem apparently
contradictory or incongruous.