Hi! This is the 2nd review from your For the Better Good AUCTION prize package. This story may not have been written during Halloween season, but it's certainly spooky enough to fit right in! I really like how you set the scene: a riverfront property below a structurally questionable dam, pending storms, and a warning. The disappearing old man also segued nicely into the newspaper article and the stories heard around town. I thought the dialogue was appropriate to each scene, and the scenes followed each other in the proper order.

I'm not a grammar expert, but I do have five suggestions for improvement, the first four of which kind of took me out of the story a little: 1) insert a space between 'that' and 'my' in "...dam was decaying and thatmy family..."; 2) remove the second 'out' in the sentence about the newspaper clipping; 3) it should be 'DEVASTATED' vs 'DEVESTATED'; 4) there are a couple of dialogue bits where the question mark is outside the quotation marks, rather than inside (an oversight, I'm sure, as the rest of them are where they belong); and 5) I would change 'build' to 'built' in the first paragraph about the '41 flood (everything else is in the past tense, so it just seems to fit better).

Like I said, they're just suggestions, but I think they'd spruce up a story destined for greater things. Thanks for sharing this with us, and keep writing!

Reviews are like a box of chocolates. Take what you like and toss the rest. F. Gimp

My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .