Did the book come to a satisfactory closure for you? Why/not?

Peace Like a River did not come to a satisfactory closure for me. I finished reading and was not happy with the outcome. I thought it was horribly unfair for the father to die. I thought it was horribly unfair that Roxanna had been married to the father for only three months when her husband died, and she was left to take care of Reuben and Swede all by herself. I didn't like it that Davy continued to be an outlaw and could never really be with his family ever again. The only thing I was satisfied with was that Davy would let Reuben run into him every once in a while. Except, he never let Swede find him, which I also thought was horribly unfair. I am the youngest sibling, and if my sister was estranged from our family and only ever met with my brothers I would be very upset, so I can relate to Swede in that regard. I was also unsatisfied with the fact that Jape Waltzer shot the father and Reuben, then ran away and was never found. I understand that Leif Enger couldn't just write a happy ending where everything good happened, that wouldn't be realistic or effective, but I still found the end of the book unsatisfactory.

Does the author seem to have a friendly, unfriendly, or some other type of relationship with the audience? Why do you think so?

I think that Leif Enger has a very friendly relationship with the audience. He wants to share Reuben's miracles with his audience. Enger speaks from Reuben's point of view and he always sounds like he really wants the audience to understand and side with Reuben. Reuben is a young, asthmatic boy who believes in miracles and is nice to his sister. I think that Enger's choice to make his hero this likable was an attempt to bring the audience in and make them want to have a friendly relationship with the content of the book. Now that I think about it, however, I can't imagine a scenario in which an author would have an unfriendly relationship with the audience. If I am reading a book and I feel like the author is being mean to me, I am going to stop reading it. That reminds me of the beginning of The Hobbit that we looked at in class a while ago and noticed that J.R.R. Tolkein used lots of tools to put his audience on his side. That is what Enger did also, by creating a character whom the audience finds endearing and friendly.

If the purpose is implicit, tell what you think the purpose of the book is and why.

I finished How the Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis and am now reading Peace Like a River by Leif Enger.

I am not really sure what I think is the purpose of this book yet; I will try to work it out as I write this. I don't know very much about Leif Enger's personal life or background, but I feel like he must be somewhat similar to Reuben Land, the main character, in order for him to have captured his character, fears, beliefs, personality, and experiences so fully. I'm not saying that I believe that Enger went on a cross-country trek with his religious father and poet sister to find his outlaw brother, but from my experience authors write about things that are familiar to them. I bet that Enger grew up with a religious background, as his book carries this religious theme of faith and miracles. He most likely knew someone like Swede who had an innate gift for storytelling as well as poetry and meter. I would also guess that he did have an older brother, to whom he always looked up but maybe shouldn't have. So based on what I know about the book and what I can infer about Enger himself, I feel that the purpose of his book is to inform his readers about things he believes in, i.e. miracles, faith, family, morality. I am not a religious person. To me personally, it felt like he was trying to convince me of these religious things he experienced. It felt like he was trying to turn me, a skeptic, into a believer. I don't necessarily think that was his goal in writing it, but I do think his goal had to do with teaching his audience about these things that he believes in.

What has the writer done to engage you, the reader, in a relationship with the book’s content?

Jacob Riis uses a combination of statistics, facts, and personal examples to engage the reader. His goal is to engage the reader to such an extreme level that the reader feels compelled to do something about the issue at hand. His most effective method of engaging the reader I felt was his anecdotes about real people living in the tenements. He told stories about mothers so destitute that they could not care for their children and left them on the doorsteps of wealthier households. He told a story about two elderly sisters who had made their livings as seamstresses, but now were going blind and could not work. With no family to take care of them, the only option left for them was to wait until starvation took over. For me, I was most affected when I could picture a face of the people actually going through these tragedies and hardships. Riis also sometimes used statistics, saying X % of people in tenements make under Y dollars a month. These numbers were arbitrary to me; I am reading this book in the 21st century when it was written in the 19th. Inflation has occurred; rent on a tenement no longer is 12 dollars a month. I have nothing to compare that to and those numbers are meaningless to me. Of course, I understand that Riis did not write this book with the expectation that people would read it over one hundred years later and he did not have that in mind when putting in his statistics. His goal was for his readers to become aware of the atrocities occurring in the New York tenements, and for his purpose hard cold facts would do the job very nicely.