Epistolary Wrting

The epistolary style of the writing in “The Last Days of Summer” makes the book more unique as well as more entertaining to read. The epistolary style means that the book is not told from a narrator, and the dialogue is not all in conversations, instead, the book is written in the form of mostly letters, with report cards, ticket stubs, and telegrams thrown in. The book follows a boy named Joey Margolis, a twelve year old Jewish boy who has major troubles with boys on his street beating him up because of his religion. He begins writing to Charlie Banks, 3rd baseman for the New York Giants, to find someone to stick up for him. Joey and Charlie develop an very unusual relationship, as well as a very close one. Joey ends up going on a road trip with the New York Giants, and becomes very good friends with famous singer, Hazel. The style of writing makes this book much more enjoyable because of the fact that not only do you get the story, but you also get a form of cleverness that you wouldn’t normally see in a book. The hidden humor requires readers to pay much more attention to pick up on the subtle hints that are encoded in the book. The fact that we have the ability to pick up on the story is amazing with this kind of writing, but the fun part about it is that we can see the story from many different sides. For example, when Joey and Charlie are writing letters to Hazel, we hear one side of the story from Joey, making Charlie seem like a mean person that locked him in a room in the train. While when Charlie writes a letter to Hazel at about the same time at about the same situation, he makes it seem as though Joey was being incredibly difficult. The fact that we get to see the same situations from so many different sides adds a great deal of humor and enjoyment to the book. It helps to piece things together in a way that helps the reader to side with certain characters, and understand the situations that they are in much better then the typical style of writing.