Reader Response to How Dare The Sun Rise

In this blog post I will provide a reader response to the novel How Dare The Sun Rise by Sandra Uwiringiyimana. In the reader response I will touch on how elements of my personal history and my personal qualities affected my reading of the book, how the books textual properties affected my reading of the book, and how contextual properties related to where and how I read the novel affected my reading of it.

            When it comes to my personal history, I did not have a lot to relate to in the novel. The author’s life story and the events that occurred within it are very different from my own. I have never been part of a minority group that faced heavy persecution and had to flee their home on multiple occasions, I have never been a stateless refuge, and I have never been an immigrant to a new country that faced racial and cultural discrimination, all of which the author and her family have been. I have always lived in Canada and been a Canadian citizen and have never faced discrimination or displacement of any kind owing to the fact that I have a fully European background and therefore belong to the most privileged racial group. The only events in the book that I can relate to are when the author talks about growing up in a household with many siblings as I also have many siblings. Another thing from my personal history that I could connect with the author’s life about was her parents always having high academic expectations of her, as my parents also did with me. When it comes to my personal qualities, I found that they had a large effect on my reading of the novel. Since I am generally a kind-hearted and caring person, I was absolutely appalled by many of the events in the novel and could not help but feel extremely sorry and sad for the author and her family while reading it. Also, since I am a tolerant and accepting person, I could not really comprehend how people could treat the author and her family so horribly because of their race and/or culture throughout the book and show no visible remorse for it.

            I found when reading How Dare The Sun Rise that its textual features were appealing for the most part and had positive effects on my reading of the novel. The novel’s structure and sequencing of events were perfect I thought and helped me to fully understand the author’s life and actually remember the events that took place during the book. The large font size of the text and good amount of spacing between lines was also helpful as I find when the text of a book is small and crammed onto a page with little spacing that I have a hard time remember my place on the page and get confused, this was not the case with this book. I found the vocabulary of the book to be incredibly clear and straight forward as well, which again aided in my complete understanding of the novel’s content. The only textual feature of the novel that I did not like was where the pictures were placed. I don’t understand why they are all placed between pages 152 and 153 and not at the beginning or end of the novel or in a place that they actually related to, it honestly seems like they were just randomly placed.

            Contextual properties related to how and where I read the novel also affected my reading of it. I read the novel over a span of two days and about eight hours total in a few different places in my house. For the most part I read the novel in my basement by myself in peace and quiet. The sections that I read in this manner I remembered perfectly and did not have to go over more than once. However, I read some of the novel on the main floor of my house with other people present and so the noise level was substantially higher when I read in this area. So, I was more distracted and remembered less of the content from the sections that I read in this manner and found myself having to go back re-read a lot of them, some more than twice. I also found since I read the novel over a span of two days instead one that I forgot some parts of the book that I read the first day and had to go over and skim them before continuing on in the second day.