Bloody mary - summary and analysis professor Thomas PDF

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summary and analysis professor Thomas...

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Hayden Rigby English 2005 November 1st 2016 Bloody Mary

This story is about a girl named Maddie. She is schizophrenic and has intense visual and auditory hallucinations. She says her hallucinations are trauma induced from an incident in high school where she was at a sleepover where Maddie was dared to summon Bloody Mary, who actually appeared and killed another girl named Sophie. At the beginning of the story Maddie has a hallucination that Sophie is coming back from the dead to hurt her often. Maddie’s roommate, Dawn, who she hears Maddie screaming and she runs to help her. Maddie realizes that she had a hallucination, and Dawn asks her if it was Sophie again. Maddie gets mad at Dawn’s presence. Her mother made her live with Dawn, and Maddie suspects Dawn only does things to make her feel bad about herself. Dawn had a mother who had schizophrenia and does charity work with mentally ill people. She also is dating Drew, the boy who works with Maddie, that she is obsessed with. Maddie covers one of Drew’s shifts at work, and is taking inventory in the haunted attic. She hits her head and passes out. Drew and Maddie find her and she starts to have another hallucination. She thinks that Bloody Mary kills Drew, but after when she is fighting with Dawn, she realizes that she killed Drew and Sophie. Drew takes Maddie to a hospital. I loved the idea behind this story. I was terrified of Bloody Mary when I was little, so I was really excited to read this. I think you had a lot of really strong imagery in this story. I loved the gruesome description of Sophie in the beginning of the story. You did a good job conveying how horrific the hallucination was, and all of the images you described gave me a really clear picture of what was going on. I think it would be helpful if towards the beginning of the story Maddie had some sort of flashback to what Maddie thought happened on the night Sophie died. This night seems to be such a central part of the story, but we never really get a clear picture of what happened that night. I think it would be good if there was a flashback to this night and you describe what happened in a scene early on in the story. Maddie’s age confused me. This is a really minor thing that would be easy to change, but if Maddie had been a junior in high school when Sophie died, and if she had graduated from college a year ago, I don’t think she would be 23. She would probably be two or three years older. I was also confused at why Maddie’s mother has a say in who Maddie rooms with. It seems like if Maddie was out of college, and she really hated living with Dawn that she would just quit listening to her mother, and not live with Dawn anymore. Another small part that would be an easy fix is the part on page 5, where Maddie picks up a shift for Drew, but thinks about how Drew would still be getting paid for the hours that he wasn’t working. That’s usually not how picking up a shift works at a retail job, so I thought that this part was a little bit strange or unbelievable. I think it’s enough to just have Maddie be annoyed that she is picking up his shift because she had wanted to go home and watch the new episode of Criminal Minds. Another small fix would be the line on the end of the first paragraph on page 5, where Maddie is thinking about how jealously is just a chemical reaction, unlike her

hallucinations. I would take out that part because hallucinations are caused by abnormal chemical reactions in the brain. I was confused about why Maddie knew that her hallucinations of Sophie were just hallucinations, and she was aware that she had schizophrenia, but she still thought that Bloody Mary was real. It seems like she flips back and forth, sometimes having an awareness of her illness, and sometimes not. I think that it might be cool if you hinted at the fact that Maddie was actually the one that killed Sophie, to make the readers suspicious earlier on that Maddie had been the killer. I didn’t realize that Bloody Mary wasn’t actually real until after Drew’s death. I think you could emphasize Maddie’s anger towards Drew before he gets killed, so the readers start to think that Bloody Mary might not actually be there earlier on....