First Love

Information

Status

Completed

Year

2019

Author

Welty

• Chapter 8
  Apr 17, 2019
• Chapter 7
  Apr 17, 2019
• Chapter 6
  Apr 17, 2019
• Chapter 5
  Apr 17, 2019
• Chapter 4
  Apr 17, 2019
• Chapter 3
  Apr 17, 2019
• Chapter 2
  Apr 17, 2019
• Chapter 1
  Apr 16, 2019

Reviews

Community Reviews(2)

• B. A. Baker (Thedude3445)Royal Road

  ★★★ 3.0

  (The score here is generous because I know how the RRL rating system affects story algorithms)
  There's something in this short story that could be here, something that could be mined for great success, but as it is now, it's just some events that happen, and then they end.
  I think the main character's name was mentioned like, once, in passing. This is evident of exactly how the story is going to play out. None of the characters have any personality, any real history, and moments that hook you. For a short story, where in just fifteen pages we're expected to consume an entire tale, this is a fatal error.
  This story does a kind of minimalist approach to storytelling, focusing almost exclusively on the dialogue between the characters rather than their actions or the descriptions of the world around them, or anything in their lives. However, this works against it because we get nothing to latch onto to care about, and it actually completely undermines the crux of the story: old flames meeting again after a long time apart.
  We get absolutely no information about Lexi, this woman who used to date the protagonist decades earlier. What does she do? Why is she in Sapporo coincidentally? Is she Japanese or American? (she speaks perfectly fluent English, and her name is Lexi, but she is living in Japan, and sometimes has kind of rigid language that could be taken as "person writing an ESL character" I guess) Why the heck is she so instantly smitten with this dude that she dated so long ago? He seems so much less into her than she is him, and it feels really weird because we just don't know enough about either of them, or about their relationship together, or how they feel about each other.
  Minimalism is good when it works, but it doesn't work here because the focus is on dialogue and expositon through dialogue (e.g. "Man, what a crazy meeting we had all night! I'm glad it's over now!" "Yeah, me too, now I can go to that date I had planned."). Almost no picture of what summer i
• RznRoyal Road

  ★★★ 2.5

  The story is about two former lovers reuniting, but the prose itself is full of awkward and strange dialogue. Much of the piece is spent on irrelevant aspects that neither deepen our understanding of the characters, the setting or the emotions at play. The main story takes place in Japan, but it could have taken place anywhere because it doesn't contribute meaningfully to the story. The ending was unbelievable and encapsulated the problems with the story in all but a few lines. The story has some errors in the prose, and a copyedit is a good idea, but the underlying issues with the character and the dialogue take precedence here. The story can easily be adjusted to make this work. It is not a bad story, but some of the elements just don't work well as is.
  Significant spoiler for ending that highlights a major problem:
  No minimally aware wife is going to miss seeing lipstick on her husband's face when he comes home from a business trip. Either the wife knows and we get no resolution or she's as dense as the MC and accepts the gaslighting. Either way is a problem.