“How good it felt, how safe and enfolding, walking shoulder to shoulder towards a shared enemy.”

This passage introduces The Danger of Mob Mentality as a central theme. The alliteration of “shoulder to shoulder” and “shared” creates a rhythm that mimics the mob’s march towards the sisters.

“Something surged within him then, an unmasterable rage. The sisters seemed not to see him at all, nor to hear him speak. To be disrespected on his own ferry…He wouldn’t stand for it. This was his dominion.”

By using the grandiose word “dominion” to describe Pete’s ferry, Purvis uses diction to expose the disproportion between the antagonist’s limited real-world authority and his inflated self-image. The ellipsis reflects how his wounded pride renders him speechless. The passage’s use of free indirect discourse fuses narrator and character, giving the reader an inside view of how masculine entitlement distorts logic.

“It was only when she saw one of them—Hester, was it?—and then another—Mary, the youngest—rush forward to the vast, twitching body and try with feeble arms to roll it back into the water, that she realised they didn’t share in the excitement at all.”

The use of em-dashes breaks up the excerpt in a way that illustrates Temperance’s dawning, piecemeal recognition of how the sisters’ reaction differs from the rest of the villagers’. By juxtaposing the “vast, twitching body” of the sturgeon with the small, “feeble” arms trying to save the fish, the author sets the sisters’ empathy in contrast with the cruelty of their community, cementing their outsider status.