Surrender Analysis

Surrender takes place in a small town in rural Australia. To hear Gabriel describe it, Mulyan is nothing special; Finnigan even tells us that no one chooses to come to the town. Like every small to...

This book gives us a first person narrator… with a twist. Like, a major twist. Gabriel, after all, is actually also Finnigan—and yes, that means our narrator has a split personality. Or that ou...

Make no mistake: Surrender gets our hearts pumping with its brutal murders by hatchet and refrigerator, arson, strange events, and, of course, Finnigan, who pretty much oozes evil. At its heart, th...

Before we even know what's up with Finnigan and Gabriel, we know something bad is about to happen. How? The tone is awfully gloomy. Check out how Gabriel describes himself: In the center of my palm...

If you're scratching your head wondering how something can be both straightforward and poetic, stick with us and we'll happily spell it out for you. It's kind of our thing, after all. To be clear,...

Have you visited our lovely "Symbols" section yet? We have quite a nice write-up about Surrender the dog over there, and we highly recommend that you check it out. It definitely cracks Surrender as...

What do you get when you combine an angry sixteen-year-old, a hatchet, and his self-centered parents? Not something pretty, that's for sure. In Surrender, Gabriel kills his parents, wills himself t...

We'll be the first to admit that Surrender is no cakewalk. First, there's the constant switching back and forth between present and past events—sometimes we're not even sure which timeline we're...

Gabriel is Dying to Tell Us a Story We start at the very end. Or near the end of Gabriel's life, at least. He's on his deathbed at the ripe old age of twenty, ready to tell us a story. We're pulled...

Surrender is based on a true story… sort of. Author Sonya Hartnett got the idea from a news article about a man who murdered his family in a small town. (Source.) Sonya Hartnett wrote her first...

Some books are steamy because they're sexy, but some books are steamy because they're creepy as all get-out. Guess which side this book falls on? Yeah, the side that'll make you jump at every littl...

As You Like It by William Shakespeare (4.1) The Bible (2.15; 5.57; 21.1)The Angel Gabriel (throughout)Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (throughout)