The Trojan Prince: A Short Story Review

Tessa Hadley lives in Cardiff, Wales, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University.  Her first novel, Accidents in the Home, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. 

She wrote a fiction short story featured in the New Yorker Nov 15, 2010 edition, called The Trojan Prince.
 
The story is about a 16 year old boy named James McIlvanney in a 1920 setting; just missing the First World War. He is infatuated with a girl named Ellen Pearson, who is really his second cousin. But marriage wasn't on his to do list, and thought he may be going away to sea shortly anyway. His floundering over Ellen is interrupted throughout by Connie Chappell, one of Ellen's close friends. The plot goes forward at a fairly slow pace, little suspense, but used very descriptive scenes to help the reader along with James pondering over Ellen and whether or not he'd be happy in marriage with her, or if he should follow his urge to go out to sea.
 
This piece was well written, using great examples of dialogue, point of view, and characterization. However the story seemed bogged down with a slow pace, and only the descriptive writing style kept me intrigued. By the end of the story I did find myself somewhat attached to the characters, the main character James in particular, but was squandered by an ending I questioned of being believable.
 
But overall I enjoyed reading this story and look forward to reading another from Tessa Hadley in the near future.

Reader Beware

My personal reflection of the advertising project Buyer Beware

So here I am and the buyer beware project is over, finally.   Up until the last week and a half, this project had really taken a backstage to the controlled chaos that is CreComm.  When the project was first given to us, we discussed what consumer report would the public benefit from the most, if they were to learn about a company/service.  Everyone in the group was aware of pay day loans, and the new government regulations that were coming into affect to protect customers.  So we thought it would be a really good project, if the public knew more about pay day loans, and how financially unfeasible they are, they may avoid them.  So one of our first steps was to find a well known company who provided that service.  We landed upon Money Mart, one of the biggest players in that market.  We delegated responsibilities to each member of the team.  Shaun went to a Money Mart, and learned more about the customer experience in the store.  Tom and Brian looked at government regulations on pay day loans.  Jon went to an RBC and talked to someone there to talk about other options other than pay day loans, such as credit cards, line of credit, overdrafts and other options.  It was my job to talk to Money Mart customers, and get their thoughts on the services they provided.  So I talked to my girlfriend, and asked her if she knew anyone that had used Money Mart before.  After a few days, she talked to some friends and it turned out that Ashton Beaton had used Money Mart before; she was a girl I used to work with at Wal-Mart in Selkirk, so I thought that would be a good source for a customer perspective.  I met up with her at work on her break, and asked her all the relevant questions I could think of and she told me her story. At this point in the project, everyone had their piece typed up and we were ready to put the pieces together.  My piece was the interview with Ashton, which I couldn’t see as a very large part of the main report, so I quickly felt like I needed to add more to the project.  We realized that we needed to do a class presentation, so I took it upon myself to put the Power Point together.  I thought it was important to say why customers choose Money Mart, and look at other options for them.  The last few days we sent lots of e-mails to each other and exchanged our pieces.  By the time the deadline came around, I think the rest of the team felt fairly confident, I was at least.  I think the presentation went well, everyone explained his part of the project clearly, and I think it was easy to understand.  I saw this as a good group effort, and everyone did a good job.