Evergreen. - Comments

I loved this so much, oh my god sghspghsphg. The layout is amazing, and the story was just... so raw, and true. I'm really tempted to read it again, just for the heck of it.

And on a side note (I completely forgot to add this before!) I think that the 'fantasy' world, which I am assuming is his memories, could perhaps be extended a bit. The beginning seems like just an introduction. In the middle, maybe have the main character escape mentally into his memories.

The story started out strongly, and you used the picture very well to form your story. But as it progresses through him moving to the city and getting a crappy job, I think that somewhere in there the transition wasn't fully made. Also, having lost a father myself I can openly relate to this story. Although so much of this anger he is harbouring for years and years probably wouldn't pan out like that.

There are a lot of small inconsistencies that probably could be tidied up a bit, as your other reviewers have pointed out. Good luck and thanks for entering!

Story Review Game

Long Summary

I thought the long summary was pretty good. I liked that you set it up as this happy memory and gave us a bit of a back-story to this family. I found some of the wording to be a bit awkward though - like here: Our trees were always huge, majestic and beautiful. They were always decorated like the magazines: ornaments placed carefully, all red and gold and piney green., I think it gets to be a bit too wordy and there’s something off wording that’s interrupting the flow of it. (I think maybe if you play around with removing the word “always” or the phrase “they were”…)

Story

I absolutely loved the description in the first paragraph. It was the perfect opening.

I beamed as he told me to step back, brandishing the chainsaw and starting the cut. – Though I did like the imagery here and the idea of this father and daughter hiking out to the woods, picking out a tree, and then just hacking down as their own, I did think twice about the logistics of it all. I’ve never cut down a tree but I’d think it would be dangerous to have a little girl close by while a father pulls out a chainsaw and attempts to topple an entire tree. It just stuck out to me as odd, but maybe that’s how it’s actually done? I don’t know, I grew up in the city.

More than the one in my first apartment; the crappy little dwarf tree that it was grew on me. But it didn’t hold a candle to this one. – The punctuation here seems off. I had to read it over a few times and even then it still sounded choppy. I do like, however, that we get a bit of a subtle glimpse into her future. Even though we already know her father died and sort of…tainted the tradition, we get to see that somehow she did get over his death and was able to keep the tradition going.

They looked stupid, not filling the space left in Dad’s wake, the décor haphazard. We got them from goddamn parking lot dealers. – The sort of rising anger in these two sentence (well, really moving along in that entire paragraph) was done really nicely. I like how it reflects that way you sometimes get so worked up just talking about things, that way you start out relatively calm and just incline to this level of almost rage. It’s just nearly hysteria.

I came to dread the month of December… I thought maybe I could play up the stock market. – This whole piece kind of caught me off guard. I feel like there wasn’t a smooth enough transition. One minute you’re talking about her father being killed and the next minute she’s off to college.

I really like that sort of bittersweet tone of this. That she has the moments when she’s really upset about the loss of her father, but they’re mixed in with memories that should make her happy and prideful (first apartment, first Christmas on her own…).

*Okay, up until this point, I hadn’t realized the main character was a boy. So…yeah. XD I don’t know if that’s because most 1st person stories on Mibba are from the girl’s POV or if there are things about him that didn’t seem masculine… I don’t know. *

I don’t know if I was really sold on the personality of the character. There was something about how spoiled he was in comparison to his background and family life that didn’t really add up to me. His attitude, the way he is with money and his parents’ fund seems more like that of a kid that did grow up in the city, rather than a kid that moved there later on in life. From how you described the family unit before his father’s death and the fact that they cut down their own tree, made me think that they were country folk. So that was a bit confusing for me.

* Just a technical thing: bank accounts aren’t canceled, their closed. It was just weird seeing Account Cancelled in the story.

The landlord thing was something I just didn’t find realistic. The landlord simply taking things out of the apartment in lieu of an actually payment. I think that possibly it would pass for one month, but certainly a landlord wouldn’t deal with not getting the actually money month after month. Also, the cost of rent, $150 a month, is pretty much impossibly cheap and if he was getting paid even just minimum wage, he’d be able to pay that. [Edit] Just seen that the story takes place in Brooklyn (New York, yes?). Definitely not a realistic rent. The cheapest apartments available would be something like $1,500 a month for a three bedroom (which would only be cheap because you’d share it with two other people).

The ending, I think, was definitely the most realistic part of the story. The fact that he’d reached his end and just had to do. Not only did he have to go home because he had no place or money to live, but also the need to return home because the feeling of helplessness.

Overall, I think this was pretty good. There were some issues with facts being a bit off and I did find at times that the way the guy handled the trauma of losing his dad and then dealing with the issues that followed were too predictable – but there were enough good parts, particularly nice wording, that more than made up for it.

Layout: Ok, I love the picture and the layout is simple and easy to read, I like it.

Ok, so the opening conversation with her dad is adorable, he seems like such a nice guy and I can already tell what their relationship is like.

“ They were always decorated like the magazines: ornaments placed carefully, all red and gold and piney green. Those trees were the centerpieces of our home for the month of December.”

I love this description; I know exactly what you’re talking about. Comparing the trees to the ones in magazines was great because I know how that looks, those perfect trees where the ornaments look like a set as opposed to all those random ones accumulated over the years and making them “centerpieces” just enforces that.

“They weren’t just Christmas trees. Our family never went to church anyways.”

Hm…this second line seems kinda weird to me, I don’t see what the religious beliefs of the family has to do with anything considering that you’re describing trees.

“Until Dad died, I mean.”

This line seemed really impactful to me, the tone was all cute and light hearted and then you mentioned death, completely changed the mood.

“After that… After that, it just seemed like everything went bad.”

I like how blunt this is and the … really makes it feel like she’s getting lost in though, I like that touch.

“They looked stupid, not filling the space left in Dad’s wake, the décor haphazard.”

I don’t really understand this sentence.

“We got them from goddamn parking lot dealers.”

Once again you’ve changed the stories tone. It went from sweet to sad and now I’m sensing some anger in your character’s narration. I really like this because to me it’s making the narrator seem more real since I know that anger is one of the stages of grief.

“When Dad died, the trees died too.”
I like this sentence a lot, the wording is just great and there’s a lot of emotion in it.

“That goddamn landlord.”

The narrator seems to be getting even angrier now. I think it’s more realistic than just a whole story about someone crying y’know?

“I settled with three-footers that I probably should have hated, but ended up liking just because they were mine.”

I think this is worded a little weird but I like the point it’s making, she’s trying to start fresh almost, a life of her own.

“I met a girl. I brought her home. I never saw her again.”

I really like this line because to me it sums up what the narrator’s life has become.

“I knew fully well that I was being a douchebag, but didn’t really care.”

I think you need to say “I didn’t really care.”

“It took several months for him to clean out the apartment.”

Um…if rent’s $150 why is he “cleaning out” the apartment? That’s not much money…

“I didn’t have friends that liked me enough to put up with that shit.”

This is sad and shows what a shell his life is…

“For a moment, I could see this tree, dressed up and standing tall in my living room, our entire family fawning over it. How it used to be. So far away, so out of reach. Was that really my life? It seemed like a whole different world, a different person.”

I like this part because it brings back the beginning of the story, it seems like since everything has changed so drastically from the beginning to this point so I almost began to forget how the story started out, you’re relating this to how it started out.

“From a life to merely an existence.”

This is a great line, I just love how it sounds.

“‘Mom, I want to come home.’”

This is a great way to end your story. I was wondering how things would turn out ok since things had gotten to such a bad point, or if this story wouldn’t have a happy ending. I’m glad it did.