What Riley's Reading

Witness
November 8, 2007

A novel about sadness, love and safety,Witness by Karen Hesse is a book that will scare you. This book has killing, blood and several other gross things that I will not mention you will just have to see for yourself.
Witness is about eleven people who live in the year 1924. It is trouble when the Ku Klux Klan comes to town. No one is safe in their own homes, especially twelve year old Leanora because she is African American and Ester who is six years old because she is a Jew. When Easter’s dad come to visit her she is sitting on his lap and all of a sudden someone fired a shot and it hit Esters dad and he slowly bleeds to death. They figured out that the killer was the preacher of their own town. He was in the K.K.K.
The theme of this novel is secrets. It is shown through the twelve people who have been keeping secrets from one another. Everyone shows this trait. Hesse wants us to walk away with the sense that African Americans and Jews had a terrible time because of the Ku Klux Klan.
This is a good book and it reads really well. It is as if the people are writing letters about what they went through and what they heard.