Como prometemos no primeiro número do Jornal Moliceiro, publicamos hoje a versão integral da recensão crítica (em inglês) do livro The Absence of Emily, de Jack Ritchie.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Reading a short story can be fun!
‘The absence Of Emily’ is a short story
written by Jack Ritchie.
The story illustrates the disappearance of a
woman named Emily and the troubles it causes. It is told in the first person,
namely by Albert.
There are three main characters: Albert:
Emily’s husband who had been previously married but his wife died in a boating
trip; Emily: shorter than normal, chubby and who could be stubborn at times and
Millicent: Emily’s cousin. She is stubborn and rich. She didn’t like Albert and
was very suspicious of him.
The story starts out with Albert, Emily’s husband, trying to convince
her cousin, Millicent that Emily is out of town, in San Francisco. He doesn’t
want to tell Millicent why she’s there so he says that she’s staying with some
friends. Throughout the story he gets phone calls and letters from Emily,
although he claims they aren’t from her.
People continue to ask Albert where Emily is and he continues to explain
that she is out of town. However,
everybody claims to have seen her in town.
Throughout the story, Albert tries to think of what he is going to do
with Emily’s clothes and walks out in the yard with a shovel. It is even brought up that his first wife
died in a boating accident and Millicent hints that he is responsible for her
death. At the end of the story, Albert
again walks out into the yard and begins digging. Just when he breaks ground
Millicent and eighteen more people show up and accuse him of trying to dig up
Emily’s grave to make sure she is actually dead. Millicent hired people to call
Albert pretending to be Emily, to send him mails, and to dress up like her and
appear around town so that Albert would lose his senses and they could catch
him. Albert states that he is simply digging up Indian arrowheads. When the men
Millicent hired try to dig up Emily’s grave, they come up empty handed just
with a few Indian arrowheads. Then we find out that Albert knew Millicent’s
trick all along and that he was just playing along because he knew what they
wanted. The story ends with Emily, the real one, calling to ask how everything
is going and assuring that she will be home soon. We find out that she is in
San Francisco at a health clinic trying to lose weight. This explains why he was
wondering what to do with her clothes. He also plans on paying for a new
wardrobe for Emily with the money he gets from Millicent. After all, she’d be
pretty embarrassed if people found out she made a fool of herself.
Our favourite part was the ending as it was quite fun and made us
rethink all of the story and Albert’s actions.
We would certainly recommend this book to a friend as it is rather
short and yet in the little amount of pages it has, it manages to leave us
speechless and gives us a big twist in the end.
By: Bianca Soares nº2 and Godeliva
Christina nº13 – 10ºC
