Response: "The Marriage of Ruth and Isaac"

“The Marriage of Ruth and Isaac” is a story from the perspective of a mother, anxiously dealing with the news that her daughter is getting married despite her young age. As she looks back and remembers her daughter when she was a little girl, she realizes now that she’s not so little, but still too young for marriage, and from the engagement announcement up and through the wedding, she silently harbors her concerns.

First off, your descriptions and imagery pertaining to the wedding scenes are excellent. You did a great job detailing each of the flower scenes without going over the top (which I’m glad because too much of that would have definitely lost my attention). This is also an emotional piece, we all know how much our parents worry about us and our futures and I think the anxiety that the narrator has about her daughter’s life with Isaac is realistic and touching, but there isn’t much tension shown right now and we don't know enough about the narrator to understand her motivation behind her fears. 

To me, it feels like there is a specific audience you’re appealing to so far, young couples who are either thinking about marriage, just married, and the parents of these groups. Adding a scene or even expanding and splitting up the first paragraph of page 2 could give you an extra dimension to the story and will help build up all the characters with dialogue. Plus I'd really like to see how Isaac complicates the plot if he does at all.

Maybe the in-laws don’t see eye to eye on wedding costs and such, or one of the families dislikes the bride or groom? Anything like that will spice up the overall tension and establish a firm conflict and change. Right now, all we have is the mother’s viewpoint and because of her passive aggressiveness, there is no established conflict. I was expecting some sort of confrontation at the bottom of page 2 or top of 3 when Ruth’s only justification for getting married is that it’s “God’s timing.” I would like to see this scenario played up a bit more as well, and maybe Ruth has other reasoning that her mother wouldn’t understand. It's great so far but I don't think it's quite finished yet.