54 pages 1 hour read

Jodi Picoult

The Storyteller

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue Summary

The novel opens with a girl named Ania talking about her childhood. She lives in a cottage on the edge of a small village with her father, the village baker. Every morning, Ania’s father bakes her a special bread roll shaped like a crown and flavored with cinnamon and chocolate. Ania and her father have a running joke about his death which involves him describing the elaborate funeral proceedings she is to organize after his passing.

On Ania’s eighteenth birthday, livestock in the village begin turning up dead, slaughtered by a mysterious creature. The creature’s presence scares away customers, and soon Ania and her father are visited by Baruch Beiler, the local tax collector, who gives them until the end of the week to pay off their debts. Ania reflects that her father “trusted [her] with the details of his death,” (3) but in the end she was too late.

Prologue Analysis

The novel’s title, The Storyteller, hints that the telling of stories will be an important practice throughout the narrative. The book opens with a snippet from a story which is distinct from the main plot. Although the meaning of the Ania story is as yet unclear, readers can assume that this parallel narrative will hold significance to the main plot.

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