Strangely, this has been my favorite read of this class. As weird and kooky as it is, I really appreciate Robert Nathan’s style. I had hoped to spend more time on it today, but sadly we had to talk about that silly final paper. We had began to pin point which genre this work could possibly fit under. Many people said either sci-fi, ghost story, or fantasy, but I feel like there is no real way to configure exactly what genre this would go under. My initial thoughts upon reading it was that it was fairly creepy and eery much like a ghost story would be. In the scene where Eben first encounters the girl, it’s just a very strange set up. We see the little girl playing by herself at dusk in an empty park with empty park benches. I half expected the Zombie mother to crawl out of the shrubbery; however, as the book progressed, I began to see different angles. I also thought, at one point, that this poor man was simply dreaming up this girl because he was lonely. I was willing to brush it off that the landlady saw her because, as a reader, I didn’t feel that she was a reliable source, but after Gus took them out to the country and exchanged glances and such with her, I was convinced that she was real. After I had gotten through most of the book, I took on a different approach. I had decided that she was real and was there to show how love transcends time and space. The more I think about it, the more difficult I find it to describe what type of book this is. I feel that she is definitely there to act as amuse, but also as an inhibitor to Eben. (The thing that inspires him most is the thing that he is so fixated on that he finds it difficult to do much else than think about her.)