Hope wakes up and gets ready for school like every other day. She goes through the same routine she’s used to. She does the same cycle over and over. She never does anything different even though she secretly wishes she could do something different every second of every day.
Hope is at her locker now. She gets the book she needs for her first class. She goes through her classes like a robot. She writes what she needs to write, remembers what she needs to remember, and talks when she needs to talk. She talks to her friends and her teachers like everything is fine because it is. She smiles and laughs. She fits in perfectly. She’s just an average girl who lives an average life.
Hope is walking home now and she’s slowing down as she nears her home like she does every day. She reaches her house and stares at it. It looks like your typical American home, white fence and everything. She slowly walks the ten paces she hates walking every single day. She opens the door and she knows what’s coming because it’s her cycle. It happens over and over again.
“Why are you late?”
Her mother’s words are always the same. They’re never different in any way, not in tone, length, or disappointment.
“I’m sorry, mother.”
“Why must you be such a disappointment to your father and me?”
Her words shouldn’t sting because they’ve been the same for years. Yet, they still make her heart ache.
“Do you need any help today, mother?”
“You can help me make dinner for your father.”
Hope and her mother go into the kitchen and make her father’s favorite meal. I guess you could call today a little different. Her father is coming home from his business trip. He hasn’t been home in weeks.
Two hours later, they’re setting the table and making sure everything is perfect before he arrives.
At exactly 8:00 he walks in. He looks the same as he always does. He’s wearing the suit her mother got him for his 35th birthday. He has a blank look on his face as if he doesn’t want to be here. They all know that none of them want to be there.
“Maria. How have you been?”
“I’ve been fine. How was your business trip, John?”
“It went fine. Thank you. Is dinner ready?”
He asks this as if he doesn’t already know the answer.
“It is. Let’s all take a seat and eat.”
To anyone this talk between a married couple would definitely be alarming, but in this house this exchange was very civil. It was as normal as they could get.
“Hope.”
“Father. How was your trip?”
She immediately regrets the words as soon as she says them. Her mother already covered that topic. Her heart starts beating faster and she prays to god that he will let just this one slip.
She looks over at him and sees that his jaw is clenched and his fingers are turning white from gripping the fork so hard.
“Did I not just discuss with your mother that the business trip went fine?”
Her heart beat speeds up and she lowers her head.
“Sorry,” she whispers. She inwardly curses at herself and asks how she could be so stupid. The whispering would just further anger him.
“Hope!” Her mother exclaims. She immediately looks up at her and she thinks she sees horror in her mother’s eyes for a split second before they go blank again.
“Look at your father when you are speaking to him,” she snarls.
Hope looks at him.
“I’m sorry, father. I must have been trying to come up with a topic for my persuasive research essay when mother brought it up.”
He doesn’t look convinced, but he lets it go.
“How are your grades?” he asks.
“I have straight A’s and I’m currently working on some extra credit for Mrs. Sander’s class. I also got Ms. Kane, our school counselor, to write a recommendation for me. My college application should be ready to be sent to Yale by the end of this week.”
He nods as if he cares and they continue to eat in silence. Suddenly, he stops and looks up.
“Who made this meal”
Her mother stiffens, but answers the question calmly.
“Hope and I both prepared the meal today. Is there something that wasn’t to your satisfaction?”
My father throws the plate to the wall. Hope flinches even though she shouldn’t. She should have seen that coming. He always does the same thing.
“That meal was absolutely abysmal. I wouldn’t serve that to a starving man.”
Of course he wouldn’t. That would mean he would be doing something nice for someone else.
“I’m sorry, John. I can make something else for you if you’d like.”
“As if I’d let you cook for me again! Why must you both be such a disappointment? Can you not do anything right?”
Hope’s mother opens her mouth to speak, but is immediately silenced.
Hope rushes over to her.
“Mother, are you alright?”
Her father yells out that he’s going on another business trip. He doesn’t say when he’ll be back, but they all know that he’ll call and let them know ahead of time. He’ll act like nothing happen and expect them to act the same. The door slams shut behind him, and she helps her mother stand up.
“Get away from me you ungrateful child!”
She recoils back and silently asks herself why she even bothered helping her.
“This is all your fault! This is all your fault!”
She yells this over and over. Hope starts picking up and cleans up the mess her father created. When she’s done, she walk upstairs and starts her nightly routine. The same cycle over and over. She never does anything different even though she secretly wishes she could do something different every second of every day. She does the routine she’s done over and over and over.
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,857 Reviews
Very well written story, with excellent structure and grammar. I felt so much empathy for Hope, The whole time I was reading I wanted to just do something for her D: I can see why Hope would be late from school all the time... I mean, nobody would want to come home to that everyday. I even felt a tiny bit of pity for the mother. I gather that she blames her daughter, because she doesn't know who else to blame. She's a typical case of battered wife syndrome, she won't fight back towards him (well maybe someday, but she didn't here), because she fears him, and Hope is kind of stuck in between all of that. Your story is amazing, and really made me feel emotional. Great job on a wonderful story
Hi there. Here's my review.
Okay, so firstly, your language and expressions are both pretty good. The imagery of constant, mind-numbing repetition day after day is quite striking and I could sympathize with the protagonist in that she felt trapped in a life she didn't want to lead, but was unable to leave behind.
The problem though, was the plot. I couldn't really grasp what was going on here. Were these people aliens? At first I thought it was just a story about an abusive family but they seemed bothered about the strangest of things. Why was the girl always late from school? Being late occasionally is understandable but if I'm late from school everyday, I'd get a lot worse than just being called a disappointment by my parents. They'd probably launch an investigation or something. And why did the father care so much if the girl repeated the same question her mother had asked. He came home, sat down to dinner, chatted with his wife and daughter about school grades and whatnot while calmly eating dinner and then suddenly in the middle of it he realized that the food wasn't to his liking and threw off the plate? What for? Surely if he didn't like the food he would've realized that when he first started eating. But he said nothing about it until well into the dinner.
The mother calls the girl a disappointment because she's late and scolds her for repeating a question at dinner, but makes no comment about her getting straight A's in class and probably getting accepted to Yale? That's some wierd priorities. Now I would understand if they didn't care about her education, but if they were sending her to school and planning to pay for college, then surely they must care at least somewhat.
I don't understand what exactly you were trying to portray here, but what it seemed to me was that these three were a bunch of space aliens trying hard to replicate normal human behaviour but failing miserably, missing out on all the nuances. The constant blank faces of all the members of the family also indicates that there was something wrong with them all. Their behaviour just seems strange and erratic rather than actually abusive. It's as if they're just being strange and rude for the sake of it without any rhyme or reason for the rudeness. I was thinking that the cause of all this strangeness would be explained at the end but since it wasn't, I must say I'm feeling rather confused right now.
To conclude, your language, expressions, imagery and style are all pretty good and well-developed, but you need to work more on plot construction. You need to be able to explain to your reader what exactly is going on, through your writing.
Keep writing and have a great day!
Hello there! How's about a review!
I've got a few things I'd like to talk about with this story. I'll start with some of the more specific, technical stuff, then I'll get onto the story as a whole.
This sentence really does run on a bit. I'm not sure if maybe it was a stylistic choice, because there are a number of long sentences in this piece, but this particular example doesn't work well. It feels clunky, and is a bit of a mouthful. It needs to be broken up a bit, and I'd also suggest rewording it so you get rid of the repetition of 'does anything different'/'do something different'. Sometimes repetition can be awesome, and you've used it well in other places in the story, but in this sentence it doesn't work very well.
Up until this point, the story was, or so it appeared, being told in third person, from the perspective of Hope. Changing it into a sort of first person omniscient narration at this point, with the 'I guess' came from nowhere and was inconsistent with the rest of the piece. Everything else about the story is in a very different voice to this sentence, which very suddenly feels much more casual. Fixing this wouldn't be a massive change - something as simple as 'Today was a little different' would be consistent with the rest of the story but still carry the same meaning.
'Father' and 'mother' should be capitalised when you're using them in this context, ie as a name or form of address.
On the whole, your spelling and grammar was excellent, and I didn't pick up any errors in that department. Your sentences flowed well, and this was a very easy story to read.
That said, I'm not sure what to make of it, in some ways. I thought that the writing was good, but at the same time, it did feel a little robotic at times, and I was left feeling quite distant to what was going on. At the start, I thought this may have been intentional, as a way of conveying Hope's feelings of her life being very monotonous. In that respect, it was very effective, but as the story progressed, I did want to connect more with what was going on, to feel some sympathy with Hope. I feel like you need to add a bit more emotion to the exchange between her and her parents. If you describe how hope is feeling more in depth then this might help your reader identify. As I said, it was difficult to tell whether you wrote the story in this kind of distant way as a stylistic choice or not, but there was definitely too much emotional distance between the reader and Hope.
You have some moments that were quite beautifully written, and were almost lyrical in nature in this piece. Your beginning was very strong, as was the last paragraph, I thought. You're definitely off to a good start. If you've got any questions, feel free to give me a shout. Happy writing!