"The Day Beverly Lost Jessica" - Paul Vance

"The Day Beverly Lost Jessica" is about the character of Beverly. Beverly is the mother of Jessica, an aspiring entertainer and singer that is pushing her mother into allowing her to audition at "WORLD WIDE MUSIC". Throughout the piece, the narrative voice and dialogue reveal many of Beverly's fears about the company and about the idea of her daughter becoming an entertainer at such a young age. By the end of the story, the mixture of Beverly's confusion and apprehension because of the mayhem of the situation around her leads to her loss of her daughter. I assume this loss is meant to be symbolically due to the hints that she just went into the other room to participate(?) in the brawl at Jackson's encouragement. Instead of remaining her little girl, Jessica becomes a figure that has found a new authority figure that she wishes to follow, that of Jackson and the record company.

The strongest point of this piece is the characterization of Beverly, especially through her reminisces of Jessica as a young girl. The reader gets some excellent images, such as "painting Easter eggs in December" and "that she would never again see her daughter's hair bounce from side to side in a pony tail as she walked." These small observations and yearnings for the past reveal much about Beverly's character. It shows her devotion to the child, as well as an image of her ideal child and what Beverly believes innocence to be. We also learn a lot about her from a generational standpoint during the scene where Jackson is listing internet celebrities that earned fame through a single Youtube video.

At the same time, some of Beverly's observations lead to some of the weakest parts of the piece. In particular, the way that Beverly's narrative voice describes the studio during the first paragraph and throughout pages three and four are jumbled and confused. While this may be intentional to show the confusion of Beverly, the syntax and some of the images led me to be completely lost while reading the description. The first paragraph is the worst offender. The first two sentences are a page-and-a-half long, and they seem to jump all over the place. Even the first part of the first sentence is very appealing to the reader. The opening is extremely passive, and if I were a consumer, I would likely have moved on to a new piece after reading the first three lines. A good way to fix this problem would be to begin with Beverly instead of "Beverly's daughter" and to begin with a definite action rather than a description of how a future action was performed.

Another weaker part of the piece was the ending. The last two pages are entirely dialogue, leaving a lot of ambiguity about what is going on around the characters during the scene. For one thing, I missed the moment at which Mark appeared, and the brawl is never really foreshadowed or explained. A return to narrative voice could be a great boon for the dialogue-heavy ending. It might help to clarify for the author a bit more as to what is going on.