Style

__** Style **__

Jane Yolen tends to use a lot of longer sentences with abundant description and information. In some paragraphs, she would use certain words repeatedly. The amount of imagery in //The Devil's Arithmetic// is astounding. As you read, it's like you're right there in the novel with Hannah/Chaya. Using such descriptions really evokes emotion in the reader, which is the purpose of this book; to fill the reader with intense emotion while exposing the horrors that occurred within the concentration camps.

Examples: "Outside, where there should have been a long, windowless hall with dark green numbered doors leading into other apartments, there was a greening field and a lowering sky. The mood hung ripely between two heavy grey clouds. A bird pelted the air with a strange, litling song. And across the field marched a shadowy figure. He had a shapeless cap on his head, a hoe over his shoulder, and he was singing:..." (Yolen, 20).

"Suddenly, Hannah notices that one of the camp babies was still cradled in a washtub. Without stopping to ask, she grabed it up and ran with the child into the middle of the midden. Garbage slipped along her bare legs. She waded through the mixture of old rags, used bandages, the emptied-out waste of the slop buckets. The midden smell was overwhelming. THough she'd already gotten used to the pervasive camp smell, a cloudy musk that seemed to hang over everything, a mix of sweat and fear and sickness and the ever-present smoke that stained the sky, the smell in the miden was worse. She closed her eyes, and lowered herself into the garbage, the baby clutched in her arms" (Yolen, 123).