By Joe Vanderheiden

A journey of perseverance.

The story starts abruptly, introducing and promptly removing the girls’ parents. The girls themselves are imprisoned without explanation. Questions only lead to abuse, so the characters simply endure, occasionally offering flashes of grief and defiant anger, but mostly keeping the audience at a distance, focusing on the immediate problem.

The story cycles through various plans to escape their fate, but ultimately renders all of the girls’ efforts moot, relying on an outside character to pluck them out of harm at the last moment, in a true example of deus ex machina.

The characters themselves are as bland as the writing, focusing on specifics such as food preferences and exercise routines without using those details as a bridge to greater insights about the character as a whole. The vocabulary and sentence structure are as repetitive as the plot, failing to create any lasting rise or fall in tension.

Perhaps the only virtue I can award this story is that it is a straightforward and easy read, but that does little good when the story itself fails to engage the audience and becomes a chore to read.

-Characters lack depth or complexity
-Plot is repetitive
-Writing is awkward and lacks strong imagery
-Characters do little to affect their fate
-The meaning is obvious and lackluster

.5/5

Next Time…
Ender’s Game-EG 01
2017/03/09