Who Needs Romance by Kelly Desrosiers - Essay Example

Kelly Desrosiers: “Who Needs Romance?”             Desrosiers’ beginning is very out of the ordinary and quaintly appealing. The reader is immediately aware of an interest in getting to know this refreshingly different speaker better. The opening takes the form of a definite statement of identity.             The story is narrated from the first-person point of view.

This is the best point of view for this story as the narrator is the protagonist and gives the reader a very intimate view of her thoughts.             There is a dialogue in the story which suits the characters and adds to the action. However, it is concentrated on one long stretch of the story and could have been more spread out.             The ending succeeds in jolting the reader out of the complacency of reading a romance.

It is a cliffhanger.             The weakness of the story is largely a tendency to repeat words in the same sentence or paragraph: “nice night, “nice few days;” “Cool, how’s the game going?” I say trying to keep it cool;” “I rush inside --- I rush and tell them;” “I’m walking on air as Thomas walks me home.”                 The strength of the story is the easy flow of the narrative and freshness of tone.

The author succeeds in making the protagonist very true-to-life. The reader readily identifies with the narrator.             The punctuation can be improved: although this haphazard punctuation has a charm of its own in the narrator’s voice. There is a sudden change of tense from the present to the past in the middle of the story, which needs to be addressed. The last paragraph could be re-written: although the idea is good, the writing does not match the level of the earlier paragraphs and the last three sentences seem stilted.