Response to "Where to Start"?

“Where to Start” describes the protagonist’s strained relationship with his parents. He feels smothered by them and resents their willingness to lie to keep him sheltered. I like the change the narrator undergoes during the story. He changes from being vaguely angry with his parents to having a specific grievance with them, but more importantly has a specific course of action he wants to take in order to oppose them. I like the narrator’s voice. He possesses a very adolescent sense of outrage. It was just right for his age. Developing the narrator’s relationship with his parents might improve the story. Right now, it seems like the parents’ sheltering is as much about self-indulgence as it is about protection, which is really interesting, but it only gives us a glimpse at the parents. You had me wanting to see more of them. They felt a little too villainous. All the mother does is smother the narrator and make him clean the basement, while the father’s sole contribution is to watch television. I felt like the story ended too soon. I wanted to see what would happen when the narrator directly opposed his parents. I also wanted to know why they lied to him, specifically, and what motivated them to home school him, other than the father’s vanity. Did the narrator’s grandfather disapprove of his daughter’s heavy-handed parenting? Is that why he gave the narrator the car?

            Sometimes the tone did not feel quite right. The narrator seemed a little worldly for a socially isolated homeschool student, and the grandfather’s message to him did not seem very natural.