Advice on how to start my story?
Question:
Should I keep the beginning like this:
Gram says I’m an ocean girl at heart, and that is true. I have lived most of my fourteen years on Reverie Island, which is not much more than a pear-shaped island roasting in a green spot along the Long Island Sound. To tourists it’s a caboodle of gift shops, lighthouses, seafood restaurants, and beaches where you rode the ferry to get there on a blistery summer day. But to me, and certainly to Gram, who had lived there for eight-four years, meant so much more.
Just over three months ago, not long after an occurrence known as The Lillian Hobbs Incident, my mother plucked my grandma, me, and all our belongings (no, that’s not true, we did not bring the inn, the garden, or the sand, which all belonged to us) like ragweed sprouting up in her garden to a rental home in New London, Connecticut.
“No ocean?” I said. “This is where we’re going to live?”
“Yes,” my mother said. “But it’s only temporary.”
Temporary. I sounded out the needle-pointed word in my head, each syllable at a time. I wondered exactly what she meant by this-was my life in Reverie all temporary to her, too?
The door opened and a blonde woman in a turquoise suit stood there. I looked up and down the street. The victorian houses were all jammed together like rows of shoeboxes in a messy closet. In front of each house was a tiny square of grass that wasn’t enough to keep a cow alive for five minutes.
“Where are the lighthouses?” I whispered as my mother waved to the lady.
“Hannah’s farm? The Art House?”
“Oh, Auden,” My mother sighed. “Come on, you know this is what we have to do. And you still have the rest of the school year.”
“We have to go back. I forgot something.”
“We’re going back, Auden,” She hissed. “You know we have to visit grandma at the hospital. She’s not doing so well.”
I thought of my grandma laying still in a bed so large she could get lost in, the sheets rising and falling with each bated breath.
“In the back of my closet,” I said, “under the floorboards. I put something there, and I’ve got to have it, before it’s too late.”
“Don’t be a goose. I have to talk to the realtor, so start talking boxes out of the car.”
I did not want to take the boxes out of the car. I did want to see fragments of my life shoved together like cattle in boxcars.
Not long ago, I started prying away at the loose wooden floorboard of my closet in Reverie shortly after Grandma’s accident one April afternoon. The inn was an old building that my mom and grandma had been restoring, room by room. Each night as I waited to hear from grandma, I pulled and pulled and pulled away at that stubborn floorboard until it broke loose. Inside it was a stack of thick, monogrammed stationery with matching envelopes. The kind that gram always used.
I fished it out and read the front.
Reverie Island, 23 Comfort Road
Lillian Hobbs
Frankfurt, Germany
u.S. Station
Jack Thomas
My heart stopped. Jack Thomas was my grandfather who I knew nothing of. For some reason, I felt afraid. It’s like I was split down the middle and one half of me wanted to open it more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything. The other half was so scared. I couldn’t stop shaking, so I placed it on the dusty floor to keep from crinkling it.
Did she hide it here?
Did she want me to find it?
I stare at it forever, and then place it back in the floorboard. Not today, I thought.
But now I needed to know the story behind those letters. Before she leaves.
The reason that my grandma’s story reminds me of the letters in the closet is that beneath her story was another one. Mine.
Or, a) start the story off with her finding the letters.
b) Have her start with The Lillian Hobbs Incident.
Thanks.
Answer:
I think you should definitely keep it the way it is! This sounds like one of those great books I would buy in an instant just from reading the first page!
Any way you could send me some more? It's excellent!
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