Review: Ridiculous.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 12 26, 2011
In the hands of someone else, this story, based on an encounter with a real street person, might have touched me. As it happened, I was so distracted by choppy sentences, unbelievable reactions and unrealistic events, I did not enjoy this at all. I only finished it to see what the author did to the characters.Examples:The main character, Greg, single parent of a little girl, "forgot how short a 6-year-old's attention span was." No, not if you truly are the sole caregiver. You LIVE with the short attention span.After standing in line for admission to a shelter, in the cold of December, the father takes his shivering little girl to a recently re-met ex-girlfriend's apartment, at about 4:30 in the afternoon, where they drink hot chocolate to warm up. The ex-girlfriend is in her nightie already, but they all decide to go out to a park on this cold, darkening December afternoon. After playing on a swing, the little girl comes back to her dad, and he helps her on with her coat. What, he lets her play outside on a cold December afternoon without her coat on? That must have been some powerful hot chocolate.*SPOILER ALERT*:The father tries to insist on going into the operating room with his little girl who's about to have brain surgery. Please. When she comes back to her room, she's comatose, but not in ICU, not on a ventilator, and there are no nurses around.The father decides he needs to help someone, so he wanders corridors of a hospital with no interference from anyone, makes his way into an adolescent psychiatric unit (which has apparently no security nor locked entrances) spends 5 minutes with a suicidal teenager (who is alone--seriously?) and miraculously, the teenager decides not to kill himself. (Psychological therapy is obviously inadequate to the situation.) Not only does the teen decide to live, but he goes to all the other adolescent patients and convince them life is worth living.THEN the little girl's physician, who has been totally intimidated by the father, offers a job to the high school dropout father, training him to be a counseling therapist. Just like that.Maybe the author should have just told the story of Greg as it happened, how it effected him, and published it as a short story. I'm sure that would have been much more interesting. And believable.Thank goodness it was a freebie.