I read this short story which is written by Raymond Carver. The story tells about mom and his son, who lies to her and makes her upset. The mom is a typical mother, who worries about everything and makes all look worst than they are.

In the beginning of the story boy is only 15 years old and a really good boy. Then it starts to happen. The nextdoor neighbour claims the boy about putting firecrackers in their cat’s ears. When mom asks about what happened, boy lies to her mom and acts all freaked out. From that day on, the mother suspects the boy about everything. The boy lies about the money, school trips and all other things. When he gets a car, he is never home. Then he buys something that really does not please the mother – a shotgun and a hunting knife.

On one day the boy sleeps in his room and mom decides to go and see what is he doing. She sees his shoes under the bed and asks why they were there. ”I ran out of gas, I had to walk for gas”, the boy says. Then mother sees her sons shirt, all wet and full of blood. The boy says he had a really bad nose blood. Mother did not believe.

Mother is so worried about his son, that she could not sleep. The boy can not take it anymore. Both of them are burned out. Then he gets his stuff and moves away. ”Believe it or not I never see him again”, mother said. She tells about her sons doings, he got himself in politics and got married. In the end of the story, mother speaks likes she is writing to somebody. The story starts with ”Dear sir:”. Who is the ”sir”? The story is little bit weird and confusing. I did not really liked it. Mother ends up alone. She lives rest of her life in fear, and when this ”sir” send a letter to her, she is confused and scared, because someone knew her new name and residence.

Full Stop is a novel written by Alecia McKenzie. The novel consists of different letters, which are written by the main character Carmen and her grandma Scottie. Carmen’s grandma Scottie is very religious and old-fashioned pensioner. She always praises God and prays for Carmen’s best. Carmen usually sends back some money, which Scottie uses mostly in things that they are not meant to be use. Scottie writes many times in her letters that ”say hello to hubby” or ”kiss hubby for me”. Carmen’s hubby is Norman, who isn’t really a remarkable character in this novel.

One of the possible main characters is Carmen’s mother, who Carmen haven’t seen but once in her lifetime. Carmen’s mother lives in London. Carmen’s father had been killed in a construction yard when Carmen and her brother Richie were six years old. Now Carmen’s mother wants to pay a visit in New York for a operation, where Carmen lives and wants to have a little chitchat. Carmen finds out all the things about her childhood and why Scottie was her foster mother. Scottie had of course told different story. When Scottie heard about Carmen’s revelations, she decided to use the money to burglar bars, what for Carmen had sent the money.

Written by KalleM

Graham Greene’s novel called ”A Shocking Accident” tells a story about a student boy, Jerome, who hears bad news from his housemaster. His housemaster, Mr Wordsworth, let him know that his father has been in a street accident, in Naples. In the first part of the novel, Mr Wordsworth says that the accident was really serious, and to be exact, Jerome’s father had died yesterday. Jerome don’t react normally to that kind of news, instead of a huge sorrow and sadness Jerome is extremely calm. Jerome assumes that his father died by a hit of a bullet, but he is wrong. Mr Wordsworth tells that Jerome’s father died because a pig fell on him. Jerome’s father was walking along a street in Nepal, when suddenly the pig fell from a balcony.

In the second part of novel, the storyteller describes the character of Jerome: he is not a crybaby, he is a person who keeps his feelings inside his head. When Jerome tells about this mysterious story to his best friend, his schoolmates give a nickname to Jerome, ”Pig”. Jerome’s aunt is very sad about her brother’s death and tells every kind of heroic stories about him, to everyone.

The time goes by, and Jerome finds a girl, Sally, and they became engaged to married. Now, when Jerome is going to be a father by himself, he realizes how much he misses his own father. Jerome tells falsely to Sally, what happened to his father. Jerome didn’t want to take Sally to see his aunt, but it happens right before the wedding. Sally hears the thruth of the accident and is horrified. Jerome, instead, is happy about Sally’s reaction: he has been scared all the time that Sally would have laughed to the real, truthful story, and stopped loving Jerome. Jerome realizes that Sally really loves him and the story has a happy ending. In my point of view, the short story teaches that if somebody honestly cares about you, she or he will love you no matter what.

Written by satc

I read Evan Hunters novel The Last Spin. It`s a brief story of two men, playing russian roulette in some basement.

Danny and Tigo belonged to different clubs, and they did not had any bad blood between themselves. In fact they were strangers to each others, before this ” event”. Tigo wanted to go first because he wanted to get that thing over with. Eventually Tigo and Danny get to know each  other, during the game. And they find out that there is many things in common between these two. After two rounds Tigo added one extra bullet to the gun. The stakes were getting higher, as the game continued. It`s hard to say why these men hadn`t never met before. Ultimately they decide to add a one more extra bullet to the gun. Colloquial language was much used in this novel, and it really made it more realistic. The ending of this novel is very ironic, but somehow so predictable. After adding the third bullet to the gun, it was Tigos turn. 50% change to die,  really made these two men  to show their feelings and they become friends. ”Click”  Tigo was safe. Right afrter that click they promised each others that this would be the last round, and after this they would establish their own gansterclub. Finally it was time for the final spin and that spin went (surprisingly) to Danny. The cylinder stopped and Danny smiled to Tigo and ”Bang”, Danny shot his brains out. After the shot Danny`s head rested on the table and shocked  Tigo began to weep.

The novel was very sad and ironic, but I liked it. It really gave me something to think about.
Written by dalliance

I read the small story called ”Why Honey?”, By Raymond Carver. The story is basically a letter from a worried and oppressed mom, a letter in which she describes her life with an oddly behaving and lying son. She is writing  The mom constantly finds herself being lied to by his son about such things as the case of their cat dying, his wages, this job and so on.  It seems that she’s suspecting that her son is practicing something homicidal, while actually she has no evidence relating to anything. All she has is her imagination and little ’clues’ like the bloody shirt in the trunk of his car. She seems to assume that whatever it is her son is supposedly doing, it’s something criminal and/or violent.

The mother seems very paranoid, she describes how she ’sees’ people spying on her and how she changed her address and got an unlisted number to keep his son from contacting her. She wanted him to think that she was dead. She is writing the letter as a reply to an unknown man who has been asking about her son. At the same time she’s amazed but doesn’t seem to be suspicious of who she’s writing to.

In my opinion, the person she’s writing to is her son after all. I can’t really justify my suspicions, I just feel like it, and it would kind of fit the overall theme of the whole story. In the end I think that the son wasn’t the one acting weird and suspiciously, I think that mother herself is the one who’s insane, judging from her actions and the way she writes and describes the whole story. After all, her son turned out to be very successful, which could be quite unusual for a homicidal and lunatic person.

I read a short story called A Shocking Accident by Graham Greene. It tells a story about Jerome whose father dies in an accident. Jerome’s father has been travelling all around the world for a while and therefore Jerome doesn’t really know him but still worships him and thinks that he is some kind of a hero, a member of the British Secret Service or something like that (while he really is a widowed author). One day Jerome’s headmaster asks him to come to his room and tells Jerome that his father is dead. Mr Wordsworth is not used to a situation like this and doesn’t know how to tell about the horrible accident, and he is quite nervous. The dialogue shows that Jerome appreciates the tough and strict headmaster Mr Wordsworth and reacts quite peacefully to the news in front of the head of the school.

The death of Jerome’s father wasn’t normal at all. First Jerome thought he was shot through the heart by some criminals, but the truth is that Jerome’s father was hit by a pig, which fell from a balcony right on him. Jerome is afraid that people would laugh when they hear the unusual way his father died, and that’s why he doesn’t want to tell about it to anyone. He has two telling methods that he rehearses: the first is to go straight to the thing and another trick is to start boringly enough. He thinks these are the ways to reduse the comic of the situation.

When Jerome grows up, he gets married to Sally. And that’s where the problems begin. Jerome doesn’t know how to tell about his father’s death to Sally so that she wouldn’t laugh. He has told her just that his father died in a street accident, and nothing else. Sally hasn’t yet met Jerome’s aunt and Jerome is very afraid of meeting her, because he knows she would tell Sally the truth about the death of his father. And that’s exctly what happens. Sally asks Jerome’s aunt, what really happened and, of course, she tells the truth. What’s surprising, is that Sally doesn’t get angry to Jerome even though he hasn’t told Sally the whole story. In fact, Sally’s reaction to the aunt’s story is exactly the same as Jerome’s: she asks, what happened to the pig. This shows that Jerome and Sally are quite alike and think the same way about the things. There was no need for Jerome to be concerned about Sally’s reaction because he obviously means  a lot to Sally and she would never laugh at his sorrow. Sally’s compassion and way to react to Jerome’s aunt’s story brings the young couple closer together and I think their relationship reaches a new level.

What happened to the pig then? I think it didn’t survive from falling down from the fifth floor. I think it died also. And wouldn’t that be just fair given the fact that it actually killed a man itself?

Written by: ki279

The short story ‘’Why, honey’’ was a story about a mother and her son, and the son didn’t have a father in the text. The son had been strange pretty much all his life, especially his teen age. Mother was blue about all the outbursts and lying, and one day the son was gone and never got back.

The narrator of the story is the mother. The text itself is sad and dramatic, maybe that’s how the mother experienced the situation. If the son had had an opportunity to tell his side of the story, it might have been a lot different from the mother’s story. I mean that maybe the mother was way too suspicious, and she, intentionally or accidentally, misunderstood all the things that her son did and said. She might have overreacted all the stuff, and that’s why he left. Also, maybe the mother’s evidences about her son being so weird were overacted. Her accusations made the son immediately guilty.

In the text, when the son had left, the mother said how she read all the things about his son in the papers; how he joined the marines, married a girl, got himself into politics, ran for governor and was elected. He was famous. She hadn’t met her son since the graduation day. She says in the text that she is afraid. In my opinion, it sounds like the mother is out of her mind. She made the text sound like the son was the evil one in the story. To me it sounded like the mom was being delusional the whole time. Seemed like she was worried for her son all the time for no reason. At the end of the day, the son didn’t actually do anything wrong in the text, never even got caught by doing bad things. So, I think that the mother was crazy all the time, not the son.

I read a short novel called Why Honey? by Raymond Carver. The text consists of a letter that the mom has written to somebody. She is telling about her son acting oddly around her. He had started lying to his mom at a young age and doing weird things such as torturing a cat, buying a shot gun and lying about his wage. The mother started to suspect bad things and became afraid. She caught into a fight with her son about his behavior and he left for good. She hasn’t spoken to him or seen him eye to eye after the fight. The boy grew up and became a politic and now the mother thinks that she has been observed by her son. She moved to another town and chanced her name.

To me the mothers accusations seemed fair. She had many reasons to suspect him. He had lied many times and done questionable things. He lied about not torturing a cat though the phenomena had a eye witness. He lied about his wage that he had drawn. Though the mother had evidence, she seems a little paranoid to me. The mother keeps telling how afraid she was and that her son wouldn’t react properly to anything, he always had a excuse.

I don’t really know what to think of the narrator. As I said she seems a little paranoid to me, especially at the end. But she does have the evidence. She is writing to somebody to share her feelings. I think she could be writing to her son who may have found out where she lives and who she actually is. Could her son be after her because he doesn’t want her to reveal his true nature?

I choose as my short story Full Stop, because the beginning seemed weird without punctuation marks, and then I realized that the story consists of letters, which was interesting.

The main character is Carmen. She writes letters to her grandma and very often sends money to her (she uses the money to something very other than it’s ment to). Grandma always writes back, without punctuation, and is always thanking God about everything. Grandma had raised Carmen, and her real mom tries to correspondence with her. Carmen’s mom had got sick, and she wants to go to surgery in Carmen’s homecity. One day mom appears to her place, and tells Carmen a very different version of Carmen’s childhood, than she had heard from her grandma.

Grandma’s reaction to Carmen’s first letter is rather provident and. She is also a bit stingy, because even if she’s quite old, she wants to paint the house herself. I would also say that she really is a good christian. In her nine letters, she mentioned God for at least 18 times. That’s a lot that.

Carmen’s mom’s and grandma’s  versions of her childhood were different. I somehow believe more grandma’s version, because she has taken care of her granddaughter for the whole Carmen’s life. On the other hand, grandma said her own daughter as a snake. That doesn’t sound as a good christian’s talk.  After all, it really is very hard to trie to say which one is telling the truth. In the last letter grandma says that she will put up the burglar bars which she had resisted at first. Maby it’s just that when the thieves had gone to a house of someone she had known, she really understood the situation. That they are able to go in her house, and rob it.

Carmen’s brother, Richie, doesn’t keep in touch with grandma. In the letters Carmen and grandma didn’t talk about Richie very much. But I still do think, that Richie’s reason for not keeping touch with grandma could be that he is more in connection with his mom. Maby he just believes another person than her sister does.

This short story was nice and a bit funny too. Sometimes the letters were hard to read without commas and other marks. I liked it very much and recommend it to others too!

I read a novel ”Why, Honey” by Raymond Carver. The novel is about worried mother and her son. She write a letter to someone and tells everything about his son and his mystic hobbies. She tells how she saw when the son brought for example a shotgun and a hunting knife to their own house. Son starts to act strangely and always lie about everything. Then the mother decides that she have to ask about these things but they ended up to a big fight and the mother had to ran to her room and locked it. She is afraid of his own son. After all this, she haven’t seen her son. Son has became really famous politician and elected to governor. Mother has changed her name, address, phone number and moved out of the city but she can’t live without those fears. She should be a proud mom but all she can think is her fears.

I think the mother’s claims was justified and she did the right thing when she asked about her son’s lies and hobbies. There was something going on and everything not seemed to be fine. The big fight wasn’t her fault and the son acted too strongly.

When I read this text, I really felt the mother’s fears and the text is really scary at some point. You can just imagine what would you do if you have  this same problem someday. I can’t say was the son really dangerous or did the mother just imagine all this? I think that the mother write to herself or actually someone who had noticed the same things have write the letter to her. Maybe someone of his politics friends. They might have really big problem if there is someone who is really messed up in politics.

short story was really interesting and you really can’t know what would happen next. All you can do is imagine. Was the mother crazy and unreasonable? If you were the son, how could you react those claims?