May's Featured Thread Is "The Bests and the Good Enoughs"

by **Gossamer** on May 1st, 2012, 6:31 pm

Ulric has chosen a Featured Thread for May 2012! Here's his review!

May’s featured thread is The Bests and the Good Enoughs, a flashback by Kit Rowan. It’s a real diamond in the rough. Alvadas is a city of illusions and chimera, where even your daily bread isn’t always as it seems. Kit exemplifies that spirit, but at the same time, she’s stalwartly truthful in girlish simplicity. Complex, yet subdued. There’s much lurking below the surface, depths she hasn’t plumbed, but it’s their absence, yet total incorporation in her behavior, that I find so poignant.

Kit is a performer, a girl hastily coming into her own yet, in a way, not entirely comprehending where she’s going. Like a dandelion’s fuzzy seeds sloughing in the breeze, there’s an inherent beauty in her portrait. Here, she gleans many lessons that’ll serve her from Whet and Darilava, a pair of hard-boiled, maybe jaded performers. The prose is beautiful in its clipped discretion, capable of sketching an image in greater clarity than all-too-bountiful gluts of verbiage.

Slowly, the narrative unfolds. It’s an ordinary day, but we see a leaking of doubts, an affirmation of intrinsic truths. There’s a struggle for agency, for the definition of self. The tug of old scars. The rousing of questions whose answers elude our grasp. The aspiration to prevail over the fettered mundane, though it’s badly hampered by jostling, crippling worries. Those qualms, and the manner they affect the character, is why I’ve always been half in love with her.

The fact remains that you can be the best. But for most of us, well, we’re just good enough.

by **Paragon** on May 1st, 2012, 6:34 pm

Congratulations Kit!

by **Indigo** on May 1st, 2012, 6:39 pm

That is an amazing gift for ideal dialogue too! Congrats and damn well done!

by **Leigo** on May 1st, 2012, 6:48 pm

Loved the style, especially how it had a really minor focus on skills. Congratulations!

by **Avari** on May 2nd, 2012, 2:52 am

Congratulations, Kit! I can't believe I never read this thread before, considering how much I enjoyed your vignettes in Yahebah. This was a lovely read, and very much deserving of the Thread of the Month.