Hi, Sumojo ,

Sorry for all the technical troubles with this review. I’m finally able to submit it, but you’ve already seen it. Thanks for the reply.

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I had the entire review ready before coming back to write the introductory part. I’m doing this review as a part of the Lodestar Contest, and I probably wouldn’t have reviewed your story otherwise. I’m best at reviewing speculative fiction, I often dig too deep into themes and hidden meanings, and I try to review only stories which speak to me. I don’t know you as a writer, I don’t know your goals and your standards, and I’m not sure you would be interested in anything I have to say. But hey, contest, right? Let’s just push through this.

You used the initial idea, which leaned towards the supernatural, to make a very real story. A young addict stages his death, choosing life on the street instead of commitment. Addiction is a sensitive topic, but the story remains neutral; it doesn’t judge the characters or push some opinion on the reader. Everyone is free to decide what to think of Sean. Is sleeping on the streets in the cold, waiting for the pension to afford a smoke, living in a constant search for the next fix a better alternative than dealing with an unplanned pregnancy? For any sensible adult, the answer is obvious. But Sean isn’t an adult yet. He’s an addict, and addicts live in a different reality. I remember how on my first week of internship in rehab, I observed a group session, young guys in their first month of sobriety. They spoke a lot about their old lives, how they used to define addicts. Not the classics of I’m not an addict because I can stop whenever I want. I’m not an addict unless it’s heroin. I’m not an addict if I smoke it. I’m not an addict if I inject, but my veins are still fine. The line gets pushed further and further. Family? They put knives to their ageing mothers’ throats, demanding to give them their pension. They took the last piece of furniture from their flats to get their next dose. “Little concern” you mention in the end defines it perfectly.

So yeah, to me, the twist you pulled there felt terrifyingly real, even if I haven’t met an addict who would go into so much trouble to disappear. I was a little sceptical about the newspaper cutout miraculously being about Sean until I realized it wasn’t accidental but rather something “Sam” kept to remind himself of his past. Would he be sentimental like that? I don’t know. But well done on making a surprising spin.

The narration style you chose leans towards omniscient. It works if you are after neutrality; it enables conciseness, helps skip longer periods, but it brings some issues (I leave you to decide how serious those issues are).

You open with an immediate scene, vivid with description and dialogue, which is great. I was somewhat confused about why someone else was sleeping on the floor in a boy’s bedroom, and you provided a much-need explanation of what was going on. Only the explanation came as a hurried, dry backstory (the entire paragraph: “Sean had called late last night asking if he could stay.”). It’s possible to pull this narration style off without the story sounding as an outline, but here, it clashes with “here and now” of the opening. I’m not religious about “showing vs telling”; in fact, I love a good “telling” story even more than cinematic depiction, and both can be (and should be) mixed and matched—with the balance in mind. In this story, your narrator leaps and skips some details (we hear this explanatory voice) and halts for others (and we get believable, but almost unjustifiably detailed dialogue).

With your choice of the narration style, a lot of emotionally heavy questions—each worth an independent story—is just a passing mention (e.g. Ben’s guilt: “Even though he knew it wasn’t his fault, he wondered if he had he done enough to dissuade Sean.”). Such sentences are a placeholder, a trigger, maybe an invitation to think about it at the reader’s own convenience. Those questions lose in potential impact that way. The situation in this story is complex, it involves so many parties—Sean, Sean’s parents, Sean’s girlfriend, Ben—each with their own struggle, you can’t possibly tackle them all in one short story. By going wide and remaining impartial, you lose depth. Emotionally, I didn’t care for any of those characters.

Another consequence of this narration style is that Ben and Sean feel very similar. We watch their actions, hear them speak, but they are “the boys”—collective—instead of two clear-cut individuals. I had to pay close attention to names to make some distinction between them. By the time I reached the passage “He heard him hit the water. Ben dropped flat on to his stomach. Lying on the hot rocks, his eyes scanned the water for his friend. He never surfaced.” I was confused about which of them had fallen. Was it Sean who saw Ben dropping flat on the water's surface? At first, I thought this issue might be mechanical and concern the use of pronouns (clarity in some sentences suffered because of it, e.g. “Sean’s girlfriend informed her parents that she’d found out she was pregnant and had told him (who?) the previous day. His (whose?) parents discovered money missing, and drug paraphernalia was found in his room.”), but now I’m inclined to believe the issue is in the distance the reader is kept from the characters.

For me—I’m not pushing for specific changes, of course—it would have been easier to follow the story and emotionally connect to the characters if the first two scenes were written in Ben’s third-person close/limited point of view. You’re already moving there with phrases like “Ben didn’t ask, thinking he’d say in his own time”, another step closer to Ben, and he would become the story’s eyes, with all his thoughts on display, leaving us, readers, with us (Ben) versus the other boy (Sean).

Besides boys being indistinguishable in the first few scenes, I somehow forgot how old they were (I know you stated that early in the story). I have no kids to judge about how normal 16-years-old behave, but their actions seemed rather childish: they were riding their bikes to the river, swinging into the water, messing about, saying “I’m in trouble”, “Mum will wonder where we are.” / “You’re such a mummy’s boy. It’s time you grew up.”—and my lazy mind put them somewhere between 11 and 14 years old. This might not be an actual issue, but I was surprised to learn an 11-year-old had a girlfriend, and she was pregnant. Funny, huh?

You might want to review the punctuation in dialogues. “Sorry, Bro,” Ben grinned, but Sean still didn’t move”: “Ben grinned” isn’t a dialogue tag but action (you can’t grin words), so it should be a full stop after “Bro”. “I’m bloody hot. We could go down to the river.” Sean suggested: “suggested” is a dialogue tag, so there should be a comma instead of a full stop after “river”.

I often encourage people to think about a theme in their stories. Find the Main Message, something you want your readers to get, not exactly a moral (nobody likes to be lectured), but something of value. Why write words when we have nothing to say, right? You have a powerful topic in this story, but I can’t see your message. Was it “he didn’t care”—Sean putting his family through pain without a second thought? You don’t have to put your theme in words, but you need to know it, to keep it in mind (and in focus) throughout your story. When you find your theme, everything in your story must be on-theme, every character must highlight—fight for or oppose—the theme, the climax must be your (often figurative) battle for the theme. If Sean being selfish is your Main Message, highlight his selfishness through his own actions or through its consequences, through other people’s reactions, through circumstances and events. Finding your theme isn’t easy, but having it makes the story tighter.

If you need any clarification or have questions, I’m open for post-review discussion. It’s all right if you don’t though.

Cheers,
J.B.

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