Thanks for requesting a review! I hope you will find this worthwhile.

First impression: Lots of action/dialogue, not a lot of exposition. This is a good thing. Also, keeping a story as short as this one to only two active characters helps to focus on their personalities rather than confusing the reader with a lot of externalities.

Suggestions: I only have a few:

It may not really matter, but since I had to look up where the Kenai River was (though I was pretty sure it was in Alaska, and I'm not *completely* ignorant about geography), I found myself wanting another setting clue.

About the only "telling" that stood out to me was the sentence: Going fishing with my dad was my favorite thing in the whole wide world. It's not that it's bad - it helps to establish the little-girl aspects of the narrator, who's on the cusp of young adulthood - it's just that there might be other ways to express this without blatantly telling us her emotion. It's not out of place later on, when she does a couple of internal monologues.

Perhaps not a huge deal, but you describe the father's hands as "blood-streaked," and then it struck me, later, when he pinched the bridge of his nose, there should be some acknowledgement of this - a stain on his face, or perhaps he's fastidious enough to wipe his fingers first. I think it would further reveal more of his character, either way, while still giving visual cues amidst the dialogue.

There's a couple of places where the tenses switch. Like toward the end: 'I swallowed hard,' past tense, then a monologue with some past perfect ("Dad's taught me to be independent") that could work as past tense as well, and then '"Thank you for telling me," I say," present tense and then back to past tense.

Opening: Excellent opening. Start with action is my usual recommendation. You do that here, and set the scene with visuals. Also, "...as I watched the stars follow us to Bing's Landing" is very evocative, because it conveys the feeling of lying on a car seat and watching the night sky excellently.

Ending: Admittedly, it took me a while to grok the symbolism of the dead fish, but once I did, it made perfect sense - showing how he finds the bright spot in even the most unfortunate situations. While there are other ways it might end, this works.

Overall: This is a story within a story, with the fishing trip framing a kind of origin tale. As I mentioned above, the characterization was well done, and focused on action, not exposition. You kept point-of-view well within its boundaries, and the few diversions into internal monologue work nicely within the story.

You list "Experience" as a genre, but it's hard to know whether this was drawn from personal experience or not - it's certainly full of enough detail to be believable, either way. If this is something for a contest that is still ongoing, I wish you the best of luck in it; and I hope this has helped in some way.

You responded to this review 03/19/2013 @ 12:01am EDT

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