Monday, May 26, 2014

A Summer's Rose, by Jed Brockett

This is a visually appealing effort that (to me) represented the best flow between the pseudonym and the title. In it, a woman tells her daughter how she met her father. That's the daughter's father.

The story itself is not long, and it's actually a retelling of the song which is a retelling of a fairy tale, itself. That loses a few points with me as I reflexively think back to Geoffrey Braithwaite, the main character in Flaubert's Parrot (which is a quick read that mucks around with lots of fiction elements. It's Ulysses without the pain, to me,) and his rules for books: knit your own stuff! Though the comp somewhat limited this, the writer's skill with just writing sentences left me hoping for more.

I liked how alternate choices believably funneled me back to the main path. I sort of wished there were more ways to derail things, or try to. And ending such as the Calvin and Hobbes strip where Dad changed the ending of Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie would've been tone-inappropriate, well, it would've been funny to have the mother sigh patiently and tell the kid she wasn't ready to hear it all, or something. This is probably me putting on my pedantic proofreading visor, though.

No comments:

Post a Comment