There is no attribute more admirable in creative fiction than to engage the reader’s attention from start to finish. It’s the art of the hook0 that enables us to “adopt a mental stance in which we are willing to accept all kinds of unrealities and improbabilities”.0 It allows us to enter what Quarrick coined as “a state of absorbed attention”.0 While it relies to some extent on our willingness to be mentally relaxed, suspend disbelief, suspend evaluative thinking and become totally captivated by the reading experience3, absorbed attention is inextricably tied to the author’s mastery of the craft of writing. Our ability to sustain absorbed attention is essential in a story such as Margot Lanagan’s Singing My Sister Down.4 This is a story about a young woman sinking to her death in a pit of hot tar, while her family eats, talks and sings close by. Any evaluative response of injustice or disbelief from us would result in us disengaging from the story and being reminded that this is a work of fiction. Amongst the most noteworthy of Lanagan’s writing craft is her ability to establish an early and enduring relationship of trust between the narrator and us. She achieves this by writing in the first person narrative, adopting a vernacular suited to the age and cultural background of the narrator, and structuring the story around the subtle and intimate connections between the narrator and other characters in the lead up to the story’s turning point. In the opening sentence, true to Fish’s argument that first sentences compress a great deal of information,0 Lanagan uses the collective first person ‘we’. It invites us to be part of this story, with the narrator from the beginning. We all went down to the tar-pit, with mats to spread our weight. (p3) This is closely followed by our introduction to the first character: Ikky was standing on the bank, her hands in a metal twin-loop behind her. She’d stopped sulking now (p3) We might not know what a twin-loop is, but we know Ikky is restrained and vulnerable. What follows then are two of the most telling sentences on this page: I thought - hoped, even - she might walk right across and into the thorns the other side; at the same time, I knew she wouldn’t do that. She nearly fell from a stumble once, but Mumma hulloo’d to her, and she straightened and walked upright out to the very middle, where she slowed and stopped. The narrator’s admission: “I knew she wouldn’t do that” invites us to trust him. We might not know what is happening b