While seeing all of the other students’ tracing projects was insightful (I really liked each novel got a good representation, so I learned something new about each of them), I wish we had some more time for discussion on Exit Wounds this week. There were quite a few things that we didn’t get to examine with this novel, and it would have been cool to talk a little more about Modan’s style. For example, someone brought up in their tracing project how Modan masterfully captures emotion in her drawings of facial expressions. I thought this was so true in this novel, and I’m glad someone brought it up. One example is on page 77, where Numi is staring at Kobi from the corners of her eyes…Modan is able to capture this perfectly, with such simple line drawings. I wonder if anyone else noticed any other great examples of this?
Overall we focused a lot on the story and less on the style, and I think that at the end we all just decided that it had a crappy ending (I disagree with this, by the way–maybe she’s too open-ended about what happens between Koby and Numi, but she did clear up the story’s big mystery about what happened to Gabriel). I wish we could have talked more about how Modan told the story–why she included such a graphic sex scene, yet left out any real graphic violence, for example. Also, we could have looked at Modan’s use of humor–sometimes black humor–in her story, and what implications this might have.
I agree with much of what you say here — we gave Exit Wounds short shrift. The sex scene in particular was next on my list of things to analyze with the novel, but we ran out of time.