Critique #102 — Abra Patrick
Kevin Andrew Murphy January 16th, 2007
When things got bad, Maureen thought about her mother. Her mother who had entered and placed second-to-last in three local beauty pageants. Her mother who had gotten married for the second time somewhere above a stretch of pasture in Iowa before tandem jumping to the earth, cheeks blushing, bra strap showing, hem floating up near her shoulders. Her mother, who had grown round and stiff from years at the telephone company, and her step-father, who had grown smaller and more jovial with each passing month, and who still found her mother irresistible. Thinking of her mother gave her a feeling of calm and warmth, and reminded her of the smell of raspberry yogurt.
When she arrived at last, the house looked gray and disappointed, as though it had been expecting someone more important, or taller. Everything about this place–the sounds of the highway nearby and the planes taking off overhead, the anachronistic carport, the impotent, tattered green awnings over the windows, and all of it looking as though it had been coated in gravel and diesel smoke—merged to trumpet one thing: Maureen’s mother was dead.
Abra,
Hoo-yea, I’m turning the page.
You hooked me from the first line, then sucker-punched me with the last, but looking back I could see the foreshadowing, subtle as it should be.
I do not know if this will be a fantasy, a mystery, science fiction, magical realism or what, but it doesn’t matter because you’ve caught me with the straight heart-strings of reality through loving and thoroughly believable details of your protagonist’s mother which makes her loss feel like what it should be, a loss.
Even my usual kvetch about having the cliffhanger on the precise last line of the sample is out the window because of the straight beauty of the prose. I’m turning the page now.
Bravo.
I suspected from all those repetitions of “her mother” in every sentence that she was dead, but otherwise, What Kevin Said. Beautiful writing, real emotion, straight and true and compelling. A page turner.
good use of small details, down to the Nina Simone song and the bra straps showing.
I don’t know if anyone cares to hear my opinion, but here it is: I, too, thought this was good and liked the detail but I thought of two things that _might_ make it even stronger.
First, when things get bad I usually think of something that makes me feel better which is either 1) things that I have to be thankful for or 2) people that have it worse off than me. At first, I thought Maureen’s mom was #2, but it became clear that she was a #1. So it threw me a bit that ‘when things got bad’ and mamma’s death was the bad thing, that Maureen was thinking of her mother to make herself feel better. For me, I’d only feel worse because I’d just lost my main ‘thankful thing’. True, it’s obviously not helping Maureen cheer up, but it seemed implied to me that she thought that it would work and I found it odd that she’d think that. Maybe this could be cleared up somehow so that it was less confusing to people like me. However, this bit worked find for everyone else, so don’t change it unless you want to.
Second, the details are great and even the more generalize things you wrote about her mother I could understand or relate to except: “…her mother…reminded her of the smell of raspberry yogurt.” I stopped reading and thought “why?” I don’t think of raspberry yogurt when I think of my mom, so I felt like there was a story there in the connection of why her mom reminded her of yogurt. But it’s missing. It’d be like you said that thinking of her mother made her think of tandem jumping without the explanation of why. I’m being very picky, I know, but maybe a line like “reminded her of the smell of _homemade_ raspberry yogurt” would personalize WHY Maureen associates mom with yogurt.