Sabrina's Response to Peter's "The Dance"

Peter’s story, “The Dance,” was about two boys on their way to a school dance. It begins with the two boys arguing during the drive to the dance. When they arrive, Chase goes into the dance while the other boy (I don’t think we ever learn his name) stays outside in the truck and smokes a joint to calm his nerves. Chase comes back outside to see what’s up and we learn that the boy cannot dance. They go into the dance and split up; Chase to see if the DJ takes requests and the boy to go talk to a group of girls, although he is stopped by a girl he knows named Mary. The “Safety Dance” song comes on and the boy sees that his friend Chase had put it on to out his friend more at ease, and everyone is happy at the end of the story. Yay!
I hate starting these reviews with “I liked the story,” so instead I’m going to say that I liked the simplicity of the story. It was a story about a kid that can’t dance who ended up not caring that he couldn’t dance by the end of the story. Boom – not complicated. I like stories like this because it gives the writer a chance to use a straightforward idea and use their writing style to make it unique.
I think Peter has a good choice of diction. The combination of words he uses makes a sentence roll off the tongue. For example,” I laughed gently and listened as the sound was carried away by the night and the wind.” I really like that line because it reminds me of a line that someone would use in a poem.
I also like the simile he used: “I expelled the smoke from my lungs like steam from an engine…” The writing style I have doesn’t restrict me from using similes and metaphors, I just trick myself into thinking it does. Reading other people’s writing helps me see how I can integrate similes and metaphors into my own writing.
“Her voice was that soft quite whisper that dripped subtext even when she didn’t mean to…” was another line I liked. I don’t know why. I just knew exactly what he meant because of the word “dripped.”
What I didn’t really like about the story was the argument in the beginning of the story. Unless the first part of the story had a point that connected to the second part of the story that I missed (which is not unlikely), I think he could have done without it. Sometimes when we don’t know how to get a story started, we kind of just start somewhere, whether it’s related to the point of the story or not. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and I’m not saying that it doesn’t, but I think Peter could have cut out the beginning and started from:
“We pulled up in front of the school right on time…”

I didn't get a copy of BJ's poem to comment :(