To begin, my teacher always says to not use transitions like “in conclusion”. The conclusion of your essay should go as follows: restate thesis, recap all main points, and the your clincher/“mic drop” you could use a transition such as “According to all compelling evidence from the book”, or “so, the audience can see” or “despite (or contrary) popular belief,”. Also, this may be a mistake but I believe “v.s” should really be spelled as versus. (I may be incorrect about that though. Also, you could consider replacing the sentence “This is striking to me as a reader because...”. It may come across as unprofessional almost? The person reader your essay already know that you have read the books and the “because” seems like an unprofessional transition. Again, just my opinion though. You could maybe say, “This is striking to me, as I have discovered...”. Also, the ending statement seems to end quite abruptly because of the long compound sentence before it. You could put a transition before it such as, “This helps me remember that no matter how unrelated...” or something of the sort. I hope I have been of some help to you!!!! Good luck!!
The first sentence is a run on sentence (meaning it needs to be made into two or more sentences because it is too long.) I personally would fix this by, "...much more in common than most readers think. This is because both of these characters see and ......". Either that, or add some more commas to make it easier to read. Also, the texts need quotation marks around them. That's about it, it looks great besides that!
