Week 8 - “The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue” by Poe Balantine

[Elodie Fichet]

I liked Balantine’s story. It sounded genuine and cute. The end paragraph came too soon and without enough notice. The transition was abrupt. I was like “best-man oohh!!” but I would have required more details.

Overall, it was a nice story, something positive and very normal for once where the kid does not fall into drugs and actually manages to keep his act straight and grow up like a good kid – not messed up like the other ones on his street. I think it’s nice to read a story like that for once. However, once again I would have liked some more details about the years following ninth grade since somehow he goes back to having a friendship with the least fortunate kid of the block. How did that happen? You would imagine that he would have grown up, studied and went away; thus loosing touch with all the other kids from the street except Homer. Apparently, it didn’t happen.

Otherwise, the story reminded me of McCarthy a little, with The Last Picture Show, especially the first part of the story where the kids are trying to figure out life and sexuality. I’m glad it didn’t turn into anything similar to this novel.

I really liked a couple witticism like “The cows are all gone; we ordered them through the clown.” I thought that was brilliant but this kind of thing fades away as the story evolves. I didn’t really like the way the narrator describes the family with short sentences or nominal sentences, it’s too cliché.

The style was pretty thick and dense, as if a kid was telling you the story, often forgetting to stop to take a breath. I think this was very well transcribed. However, I thought the story was also lacking a greater sense of place. The house was nicely described but the rest of the street was only superficial presented to the reader. I wish we had had a fuller picture of the place in order to imagine all that went on there.