Elise by Gillian Chisom

I have a feeling that everyone is going to talk about affect in the story and how Elise does not feel real, and I agree that I cannot touch this character. You start the story with her climbing a tree, but we never know how the branches felt on her skin or if she ever slipped a little or if something got caught. She just climbs to the top real fast.
However, that’s all I want to say about that as I think you know what that is all about. I would like to talk about story as kind of a follow-up to last week’s discussion. The problem in the story is that her mother wants her to marry a rich a dude, but she wants to marry for love. However, she is convinced to go ahead with the marriage because she is afraid of losing her fine things and the house and stuff. I think this is an interesting problem and it has a lot of potential. The fact that she goes through with it shows that she values things and her nice home enough to dedicate her life to some guy she doesn’t know just to keep it. That seems to be her internal struggle — I want stuff, but I also want love.
You try to make this clear in the last page or two, especially with the house of cards metaphor. However, I think you have everything set up for a powerful internal struggle, but it doesn’t come across (maybe because of the lack of the character’s affect) or maybe because we don’t see enough of her attachment to things and places enough to realize how strong of a pull it has on her. I think a great chance for this is the tree. We see her in the tree and we know she has climbed this tree many times before, but we don’t understand that this tree is so important to her that she would marry a guy for the rest of her life just to keep it.
Or maybe the child in her is just afraid of change. Maybe she hangs on the tree for it’s motherly comfort and couldn’t stand to let it go.
I feel like there are things missing that you have already done the mental work to fill in, it’s just not written. I think you know what her face looks like or what she is holding in her hand when she thinks, “If her father had been alive …” I feel like her character is very close to coming alive and that this story is in position to be very powerful.