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Marsha's Deal by Laura Solomon (view source)
Revision as of 08:23, 12 June 2018
, 08:23, 12 June 2018no edit summary
''Don't make a deal with the devil'', it says on the front cover, and Marsha summed the devil up pretty quickly when she met him, but the chance to live the life she ''wanted'' to live was an opportunity she couldn't give up. And the devil was fair: Marsha lived her life free of disease, but it wasn't free of other problems. What would she make of this second chance? But what of the devil? What was in the deal for him? Well, there was sport. He tempted seven humans - Marsha's friends and family, the ones about whom she'd provided information - into committing seven deadly sins in seven days.
It's a short story - I read it in little over an hour and then went back to reread sections I'd particularly enjoyed. Laura Solomon has a real talent for characterisation in just a few words. I ''wanted'' Laura to succeed, to have a good life the second time around, but the character who really caught my attention was the devil, with his casual attempt to seduce Marsha and his utter ''devilishness''. There's remarkably little description of him, but I had a very clear picture of himin my mind.
The plot's neat too: there's a moral in there but it's not delivered with a heavy hand. It's one of those stories which you mull over and think about long after you've finished reading. Given a chance at living your life again but without that which had constricted the first one, would ''you'' give information to the devil? But then we do this sort of thing every day, when we provide information about ourselves and others on the internet. It might be a short story, but there's a great deal of food for thought packed between the covers. Whilst I didn't 'enjoy' the story I really appreciated the way that so few words could push my mind into corners long unvisited and I'd like to thank the author for sending a copy to the Bookbag.