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 Review #4833926 |
 | Bessie  [13+] My entry for Short Shots contest for September.  |
| (4.0)  "Anniversary Reviews" is celebrating A QUARTER CENTURY of Writing.Com! This story was both sad and scary. Well, there were two stories here. One was about a robbery where the main character’s father got killed while he was protecting her. The other was about her best friend getting murdered, an event that she had blocked out so completely that she forgot about her friend altogether. The first one made me feel for her as her mother and brother appeared to be blaming her for her father’s death, treating her like they had wished she had died instead. I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a husband and father like that, and I’m sure the girl would have felt survivor’s guilt, but it wasn’t helped by her family being so unsupportive. The brother was especially hostile towards her, so on top of the trauma of the incident, she had that to deal with as well. The second one was more mysterious. As parts of the narrative were her dreams, it was a little vague what actually happened. In her dreams, she found Amber’s body but in real life, that wasn’t the case. The important part was that the killer was never found, and the ending hinted that he was watching her, waiting for the right moment to kill her as well. I wasn’t sure if it worked to put the two stories together. Unless I missed the connection, it seemed like you had two good ideas and put them into one tale when they might have been better as two separate stories. The story was very polished and I only noticed a couple of small errors: she saw a large field of wheat and girl in the distance I think there might be a word missing, “and a girl”. “I’m leaving,” she said, her voice lifting in surprise. “soon.” “Soon” should be capitalised as it is a new sentence. The main character was well drawn and I was quite invested in her fate, particularly in the first part of the story about her father's death. There were some excellent descriptions that made it easy to imagine the scenes, for example this one: Amber was so faint now that Bessie could only make out her face from memory. I was wondering what the prompt was - as this is quite an old story, you probably don’t remember, but I would always recommend using the picture as the thumbnail or at least describing it at the end of the story so that readers can see what inspired a story. The disadvantage with contests that rotate, like ‘Short Shots’ and the other official contests, is that the prompt disappears a few months later. I’m just curious though and it didn’t detract from the enjoyment of the story.
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