How To Create Suspense In Jennifer Bradbury's Shift

Shift

The book Shift, by Jennifer Bradbury, is set in two main places, Georgia Tech University and a farm owned by a couple named Morgan and Ellie. The time of day in the story is usually late afternoon to early evening and the main characters are Christopher Collins and Winston Coggans. Shift is about two best friends, a disappearance, and an FBI investigation. Chris Collins is an average eighteen year old guy. His former best friend, however, is a different case. His family is rich and very strict. They don't allow him to participate in the activities that most teenagers like to do. That’s why it was so surprising that they let him go on a cross-country bike trek with Chris. It was all fun until Chris got a flat tire one day during …show more content…
Jennifer Bradbury really made it interesting by writing it as though one chapter was Chris being interrogated and the next chapter was a in the past tense, usually a flashback to the trip or around the trip. It builds suspense better than a traditional writing format because the reader would want to read the next chapter to see where Chris and Ward are with the investigation or to see what the chapter reveals about the bike trip (depending on which chapter you were on). It definitely wasn’t too easy to read but it wasn’t too hard either. Some of the vocabulary was in bike terms so that could be confusing if you didn’t know your way around a bike or some of the biking gear that they had, but other than that it was just the right pace and it wasn’t choppy between chapters and paragraphs. I was able to predict that Win was at a farm owned by people they stayed with over the course of their bike trek named Ellie and Morgan. The only reason I was able to predict that is because when they stayed there, the author used the most details in what they did there and where they stayed making it seem more important than the other venues in which they stayed. When the author revealed that Win was still alive, I immediately thought of Ellie and Morgan's farm. The author put a certain emphasis on their time there and it made sense that Win would stay there in their barn. Especially because they were glad to have Chris and Win and the author depicted Ellie and Morgan as a couple that wouldn’t deny Win a place if he asked. I really liked the ending because after Chris found Win he went back to college. When he got back to his dorm, Abe was there. They talked for a while and drew their conclusion to an ending, resulting in Abe telling Chris that he was going to tell Chris's father that he had explored every lead and couldn’t find Win, making him give up on the case. After that, Chris went in his room and emptied out his bag