Hello abcoachnz-Sometimes around },

I just read your contest entry "The Candle" , which I found when searching the kiwi challenge board for some things to review and wanted to share my personal thoughts with you.

Disclaimer: Please remember that the following suggestions are based off of my own opinion and personal interpretation of your work. Feel free to take and/or toss out any of my suggestions.



I have a thing for candles so your story title caught my attention for obvious reasons. I was pleasantly surprised to read a story from the candles point of view.

My Overall impression is that for a contest entry with word limits, most of the time you pulled off the cryptic language while still allowing me, as a reader, to follow what was going on- difficult feat to pull off as an inanimate object, so I am impressed, but there were a few issues that caused me to stumble in a few places. I'll discuss those in more detail below.

Since it was a contest entry this review will merely consist of ways to make things more clear or places you could perhaps expand t make this into a longer more full short story. It's such a fun piece!




The most fascinating part to me is our main character the candle. The whole story is told from his point of view. I enjoyed this very much but wish you would have described the candle for me. Plain? Striped? Numbers? Letters? Anything like that to help me visualize him and his comrades a bit better.

Their three by three militant formation on the cake was interesting to me. Was it because it was a square cake? Any deeper purpose for this particular formation instead of a circle, or heart, etc.? May be for no particular reason, I'm just curious. Though, it could be a great chance at finer detail of the "Terra Firma".





Our setting- the birthday cake! Best setting ever, for a story! The place where everything happens. It looks good enough to eat, even for the candle. But that's about as much as we get here.

For a contest entry it's a great part to cut down on as it isn't completely necessary but if you were to build this into a longer piece, a little more description would add a lot of depth to the story as well.





Though you know your own plot I like to recap it so that you can see if I see it the way you intended it to be.

The candle and his comrades finally get to leave their box. This is what they were made for and our main character is excited and exhilarated about what's to come. We experience his debut, the lighting of himself which is a wonderful moment for him. But the giants and small giants become to get to close for comfort, whipping their flames around. The candle feels frightened during the singing of happy birthday and the clapping. Meanwhile discovering that him and his buddies are diminishing for some reason. Finally the moment of truth comes and just before they appear to completely melt away they are extinguished by the birthday boy/girl. Until next time.






I liked this part because it was like the candle experienced a chill up it's spine when it was lit. The first moment of his purpose.




My Suggestions ▼


Overall I really liked this story from the point of view from a candle, it was nothing like I expected, and very unique bravo. If you ever decide to add to it and/or edit it please feel free to send it my way for another review!

I enjoyed reading your work and hope my review was helpful and encouraging!

My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .