The First Stone is a book about two young women attending Ormond University in Melbourne who were at a party and claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the Master of their Un

Also, Garner makes Dr Shepherd be the first person in the novel the reader meets, so right away when he says he is innocent, we believe him, as we have not heard otherwise yet. Particularly throughout the first few chapters, Garner uses italics. She uses them for emphasis, self-expression and a sense of ridiculousness. This is an example of her conversationalist style of writing, because we read what Garner actually thinks and how she is telling what she thinks to us. Garner tells the reader her initial reaction which she convinces the reader is the one to believe. Garner wants to tell the reader outright that she is a feminist pushing fifty. She exaggerates and is a bit out of touch, and distances herself from the next generation. She successfully takes the reader on a journey, and she is liable to change her mind about her thoughts and feelings if she wants to, as no-one can challenge her opinion in the book. Garner is the most interesting character that is revealed in The First Stone because she uses figurative speech. Garner describes the courtroom where the trial took place as "the room was very small", but this is only because a lot of people were in it. She says "like sharks for meat" which means that the girls and Shepherd were targeted by the media. Garner seems to portray herself as a hard-lined woman, but the reader sees this is not all true when she says "for the first time, I felt sorry for them [the girls]" and this was said twenty pages into the book. She describes normal objects and distorts them into what she thinks they look like; for example "shielded" is the word she uses to describe Ormond University, as if it was a castle; and "vast", which makes us feel that the University is renowned for its bigness and how grand and royal it is. Garner also says that Ormond "radiates power" for people like Dr Shepherd and "overwhelmingly masculine" as if a seemingly normal building has a masculine feel. Another interesting factor about Helen Garner is how she describes herself - when she is in the courtroom, she says it is filled with "ordinary people", trying to make herself out as ordinary, when clearly she is not. It is also very interesting to see how Garner describes the people she meets. For example, for the girls who accused Shepherd of harassment, she describes their clothes in minut

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Approximate Word count = 1571
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)