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Summary Of Pam Muñoz's Echo

Decent Essays

In the book Echo, by Pam Muñoz Ryan, she tells the story of several different people throughout history. She writes of Eins, Zwei, and Drei whose souls become part of a harmonica to help them escape a forest, only to be saved when they save someone else from the brink of death. Each character is some sort of minority in his or her situation, an anti-Hitler, epileptic, boy with a birthmark on his face that making him not “Hitler-Standard”, an orphan who lives in an orphanage that is going to illegally put him to work and try to split apart him and his little brother, a little girl who is constantly on the move and ends up going to a school where they split Mexicans and other children into separate schools. The author uses several techniques all through the book all achieving different goals. She uses description to build a mood and show the characters’ motivation. She uses symbolism to portray get the readers predicting, and multiple plot …show more content…

In Friedrich’s story, the author ends on a cliffhanger which raises the stakes because we don’t know what is going to happen next and the next two parts are about different people, leaving us wondering if everything turns out okay. The author ends it by saying, “Even as Eiffel and Faber grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and marched him toward the train door, Friedrich imagined only snowy ballerinas-tiny, pure-white stars- twirling and leaping to the hypnotic music. One, two three. One , two, three. One. two, three…” The author continues by telling two more stories about children and the harmonica, ending each one similarly, leaving us thinking what happens next. The author does eventually tell how each character turned out, and when he does, he relates as how to each character’s life is connected to the other and how the harmonica played a role in all off it. I think the reason the author did this is to show the

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