Final Response

8/17/10

When I thought about reading this book I originally didn't know that it was a biography. My first thoughts were negative because most biographies I have read are sometimes uneventful or poorly written. This however, was not one of those biographies. I was surprised at how the book starts in a small town called Stamps and is somehow still easy and fun to read about. Apposed to the other book I read for this project, Angelou describes her characters right off the bat. You do not have to wait for character development to find their significance in the novel. I also noticed that Angelou doesn't draw out an event for as long as possible. She moves on to another subject because she knows it will become boring to read about the same thing for a hundred pages. For example even when she was explaining how she got raped. She wrapped the whole ordeal that effected her mentally for a year, up in about one chapter. The book was not very long but Angelou was still able to contain her astonishing life's story in only 289 pages.