Response to Patrick's "From Me for You"

Hey there, Patrick. Hope you're doing well!

So this was a story about a family dealing with the recent loss of someone during the holidays (particularly Thanksgiving), and how the main character Isaiah was dealing with the loss and how he related to his cousin. The story is mainly about how the holidays can't be the same and even going through the motions to try to recreate past family gatherings isn't good enough. Also, the main character struggles a little bit because he almost feels like he doesn't have a real right to mourn Albert, at least not like his cousin does.

As far as things that worked really well in this story, the description of the food was great. It was a very unusual Thanksgiving dinner, at least from what I'm used to, and I really appreciated that about this story. The detail about the Christmas presents already in place was also really effective, and the tweaked versions of what the tag said on pg. 4 were great. The description of the homemade wedding cake on pg. 2 was also really good. The image of the cousin in her wedding dress eating the Thanksgiving meal was very strong, and creepy actually. Which if that was what you were going for, it was great! In either case, I could picture it very clearly so good job painting that picture.

As far as suggestions go, there were a couple minor typos that I marked for you in my copy of the story. There were also a couple of places I got confused. Namely, "silent as tears trickled down her motionless" on pg. 3. Is there a word missing there? Maybe "her motionless face"? And on that page, the narrator calls Debbie is aunt but I thought she was his cousin. On pg. 4 I also got confused about the crying part in the middle of the page. Does he mean that he wants to cry, but not for Albert? He wants to cry for Debbie? And also, if Albert died that morning, would they really still go on with things? I can see continuing with celebrations if they'd had his funeral the day before or something, but that morning?? I have trouble believing that.

Finally, I guess I'm not totally sure what the change is at the end. The change seems to be in Debbie, going from crying alone to eating in her wedding dress alone. What is the change in the narrator? I guess I would like to see more action on his part. Does he go change all the Christmas present tags to just say Debbie? Does he yell at his family for going about the day normally instead of mourning Albert?

Thanks for writing!

CK