"An American Childhood" by Annie Dillard is a well-told and visually descriptive story. After reading this story, I was firstly impressed by its well organization. It provides a dramatic structure that makes readers curious, suspenseful, and somehow surprised with the unpredictable ending of the story. The story actually begins before the event begins. In the first two paragraphs, the writer explains what she learned from playing baseball as well as what she got from playing with the neighborhood boys. It's a kind of general and broad, until it's narrowed and specified by the third paragraph. This paragraph leads readers to a particular time "on one weekday morning after Christmas", and also the weather at that time "six inches of snow has just fallen. The story is also limited to a particular set of actions and a particular group of people. They are two "polite blond boys" Mikey and Peter, a "tough kid" Chickie McBride. The event seems to move slowly, and then surprisingly reach the climax when the man "in city clothes" got out of his car. When the man keeps chasing the kids, I was really curious what the man will do when he catch them. I was a kind of dissatisfied with the ending of the story. The young man didn't do anything other than saying "You stupid kids" in his Pittsburgh accent. In addition, visual description is also another good point of this story. Dillard is very successful in naming and detailing. Let's look at the way she describes the iceball "a perfect ice ball, from perfectly white snow, perfectly spherical, and squeezed perfectly translucent". The young man was described as a man "in city clothes: a suit and tie, street shoes. The car door is also detailed as a wide black door. The man chased the kids at somewhere "under a low tree, up a bank, through a hedge, down some snowy steps, and across the grocery stor
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