Response to "The Day Beverly Lost Jessica.

"The Day Beverly Lost Jessica" seems to be about the vacuity of Internet culture and the futility of fame. Beverly, Jessica’s mother, struggles because while she wants to make her daughter happy, she does not want her to lose her innocence through fame. 

I like the characterization. Beverly’s misgivings are clearly, but subtly communicated. She is obviously conflicted, which drives the story. The dialogue is well written. I think it best gets the point of the story across. As readers, we see how facile World Wide Music is. Jackson also acquires a certain amount of menace by the end, which adds a lot. I particularly liked how the song lyrics interspersed the meeting between Beverly and Jackson. The line “their hair made-up, their faces made-up, and, she couldn’t help but notice, their skirts hemmed-up” stuck out to me, since it reveals Beverly’s personality and is well constructed. Jessica acts how I would expect a twelve year old to. I can imagine someone her age saying, “You shouldn’t ask stuff like that before stuff like this, Mom.” 

I had a hard time parsing everything that wasn't dialogue. There’s a lot to like about this piece, but I had to read everything multiple times to understand it. While your sentences were very long, I think the main impediment to my understanding was the grammatical complexity. The first sentence has a phrase nested inside of a phrase followed by a relative clause, which is a compound clause interrupted by a parenthetical aside, and this is all only in the first half. Grammatical complexity is fine, and lengthy sentences are fine, but both together distract from the parts I liked the most about this piece.  And while I think the dialogue was, on the whole, awesome, I sometimes had a hard time discerning who was saying what. It might also be a good idea to play up the tension between Jessica’s desires and Beverly’s reservations, as well as Beverly and Jackson.