Jackie
In “Stubborn Fifty Mile Trail,” the main character (which I assume is Jackie herself), insists on going on a fifty-mile bicycling trip with her boyfriend and friend, even though she knows she is not in good enough shape to make the trip. Though, in the end, Jackie does end up completing the 50 mile trail, she complains throughout, is in extreme pain, and almost quits two miles before finishing, until her boyfriend yells at her to, basically, stop being such a brat.
I like Jackie’s often crass attitude in person and I think it translates well in her writing, making her story’s entertaining and also come off more real/raw. Her character isn’t presented in a particularly likable way (she’s hardheaded, complains a lot, etc.), but the fact that she’s unapologetic about her faults almost makes me like her more. I think Jackie should focus on expanding on her character so the reader gets a better sense of her as a person…maybe slipping in some details about why she is so stubborn and deadest on proving herself even though she and everyone else involved knows she’s putting herself in a situation she can’t handle (at least not with ease). Also, I think the ending needs some fine-tuning. It ends very abruptly and I’m not left with a full understanding of why this story is important or meaningful to either the author or myself. Overall, I like this story.
Mary
“The Education of Mary,” describes the five year period in Mary’s life, in which she gets in to nursing school with a baby on the way, starts off with poor grades, marries the father of her child, has her child, has to get a job and apply for government aid to make ends meet, leaves her abusive husband to live in a shelter, returns to her abusive husband and manages, through all of her travails, to graduate school with good grades. This is a lot of life to cover in a seven-paragraph short story. Any of these events, could I’m sure be deserving of their own short story. By packing so much information in, I think a lot of the details are left out which makes the story read more like a bio than short fiction/prose. I’m left wanted to know more about Mary as a person; why went back to her abusive ex? How she felt being in a shelter with a young child? I love the title and like the idea of how life can be far more educative than the classroom.
Kenny
In “My Daddy’s Cologne” the unnamed main character, who’s father abandoned him when he was a child, reminisces about the scent of his father’s cologne and recounts a childhood experience in which he recovered a bottle of the cologne dropped by his father who he hasn’t seen since that day. I love the intro to this story, in which the reader is shown a punky teenage boy, who shoplifts while wearing his father’s cologne and dreams of meeting the father that he never really knew. After reading the intro I was expecting that the story would describe this boy’s longing for his father, perhaps reveal how his father had a criminal past and discuss how the boy heads down this path as a way symbolically connect with his dad. However, instead the story veers in unexpected and really confusing direction, involving parenthetical bowl movements and a flashback to the main character’s childhood in which he is either a super baby capable of complex thought or an eight year old who still wears diapers (not quite sure which). Honestly, I think body of the story should be scrapped and the focus shifted towards the adolescent boy that we are first introduced to and who I, as a reader, was really intrigued by. Once again, really love the initial idea. The emotions and memories we associate with smell is a really interesting subject and a great short story frame.
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