 An Acme Review
This rate and review is offered in the spirit of assistance. Please feel free to ignore any, or all suggestions. This is your work, and I'm just happy to have had the chance to review it! 
This is a review on behalf of "Invalid Item" 
I'm sat here with tears stinging my eyes. This is one of the most moving accounts of battlefield brotherhood I have had the privilege of reading. Thank you. I cannot wait for the day that I'm bragging in a book shop queue: "DRSmith? Oh, yes. I used to read and comment on his work before he made the Best Seller list..."
The imagery in this story is fantastic. Use of metaphor and simile helped, but I thought the time you took to add descriptions (especially comparative ones such as the idyll of England, married to the torn countryside of France), gave such weight to your story. Details of the human cost of war were as beautifully wrought as they were harrowing. The giddy betting on races, the families back hope, the actions and reactions of the men in the field, all added to the very human cost of war that you depicted here in building your characters.
I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading this; you'll just have to believe me. The brutality of war was not skirted, but nor was it sensationalised and reveled in.
We never felt a sense of glory, no emotional rush of victory or remorse— only death and destruction as mutilated bodies piled up around us; nothing else ahead except more of the same ... Can words convey the heart-stopping jolt of a bullet pinging the side of a helmet, a mere head-bob from going through an eye? What words could possibly relay the bowel-loosening terror of lying in a foxhole trying to curl a six-foot body into a six-inch ball, bouncing with the heaving earth as horrendous concussions are raining closer to your four-foot patch of real estate? I know that kiyasama is a good writer of WWII dramatic stories, and I'm sure that she would love to read this. I'll send her a link.
There are a couple of jumps forward and back in tense. You might want to proofread specifically for these and stick to one tense throughout. The majority of distracting jumps occurred in the opening present tense scene ("Our duffle bags were waiting for us, though several will go unclaimed."), and not in the flashback/memory scenes.
Your narrative voice is strong and distinctive, but sometimes, when coupled with punctuation choices/grammatical style, meaning can be hard to immediately grasp and a second reading of a sentence/para is required to find clarity:
Perhaps for my English cousins, the invasion will offer vengeance for the Blitzkrieg and memories like Dunkirk, maybe help erase the hapless political decisions and blind apathies that led to such atrocities in the first place. But for me, it felt more like a personal payback.
Each generation seems to go from one war to another, its youth destined to mature in battle at the direction of their older, supposedly much wiser generation who had condemned the very lunacies they had wrought. Your style is your style, and I wouldn't dream of telling you to adopt any other, but you should look at punctuation. There are a few places where you ask an awful lot of a comma. It can't join two independent clauses without a conjunction after it. Sometimes, it's just best to end the sentence, but if you do have the promise of more to follow its conveyed subject, use a semicolon.
huddled together in a small LCA ... but a larger LCI revved her engines It helps retain reader clarity if you introduce any abbreviation by using its full title, before you shorten it to its abbreviated form.
Run a spell check. Admittedly, some of the misspelled words I noted are likely to be due to the amount of time I spend writing here at WDC--my UK English has changed to a pigeon US version--but there were still a couple of errors that jumped out at me (duffle bags = duffel bags?).
Thank you for sharing your work! Write on and take care
** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| (4.0)
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
(erm, different rhyme choices). I had a real blast with this form and took it to a dark place, so it's very refreshing to read the lighter side of all the fun of the fair.
My only disappointment comes with regard to the prompt of 'Fresh Starts'. If it weren't for your very last line, I doubt I would see a connection to it at all. That said, it won't affect my rating, just the judging for this contest 
Funny, witty, clever narrative poetry with a zinger of a punchline. I'd like to be all sensible and offer a proper critique ... what am I saying? No, I wouldn't! This is simply fabulous, and as far as comedy poetry goes, it does exactly what it's supposed to: you made me laugh.
"
