Response: "Password Protected"

“Password Protected” is a narration from the point of view from a young woman named Julia who is checking up on facebook at a public library and reacting to a number of different situations and statuses put up by others, and at the same time we learn that she has been dealing with her brother’s cancer. She silently judges each one while evaluating the lives of other people, effectively hiding her own life in the process. 

I liked how the story is full of tension but overall, I felt it to be lacking true conflict. Everything the narrator focuses on is online and doesn’t affect her directly until after we learn that Thomas has died. I’d like to see more of a change in Julia. She starts out as a loving sister and ends the story as a loving sister. One way to facilitate a change would be to have her resent her brother for getting cancer because it put a strain on her family and is the reason for her moving away from her friends and school.  

And I really like the ending of the story. The idea of immortalizing someone through the internet is a very modern way of honoring their memory, but Julia’s relationship with her brother is the main focus of the story and there is only one scene in which we see the two characters interact. Adding an extra scene or incorporating more details about their past together would give the story more emotion while at the same time bringing the ending around full circle.