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Night job by karen hesse6/8/2023 ![]() ![]() Leonora Sutter and Esther Hirsch are both outsiders in the rural Vermont town where they live in 1924. ![]() This study guide references the 2001 Scholastic paperback edition of Witness. Witness is a winner of the Christopher Medal, School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, ALA Notable Children’s Book, and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.Ĭontent warning: This guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word, and the novel contains instances of murder, sexual predation, and racist abuse. The novel explores themes of the vulnerability of children, coming of age, and the importance of taking a stand against injustice. The story focuses on children under duress, and the two main characters, Leonora Sutter and Esther Hirsch, are the focal points of the bubbling hatred and racism that will edge the town into violence. ![]() The narrative poems present the plot in five acts, a structure that makes Witness uniquely appropriate for Reader’s Theater. This narrative method exposes the narrator’s hidden biases, and the reader can judge the nature of the character. Hesse writes predominantly from the first-person limited perspective for each narrator, but there are 11 narrators of varying ages and genders who share their unique versions of events in poetic form, often through interior monologue. The novel is written in free verse (poetry without rhyme or meter), with different narrators presenting different poems periodically. ![]()
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