Scan barcode
A review by frakalot
Sauerkraut Station by Ferrett Steinmetz
adventurous
dark
funny
inspiring
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
http://giganotosaurus.org/2011/11/01/sauerkraut-station/
A free short story available at the above link. This is quite a quirky one and a lot of fun to read. It starts out all cutesy, with our lead actress (a ten year old Lizzie) showing her new best friend (an eight year old Themba) around Sauerkraut Station, her rotating umbrella home of 228 walls, wayyy out in the Oort Cloud.
Here on the station Lizzie lives with her Momma and her Gemma serving at most "five ships per week in the busy season". Life is generally quiet but always busy with station maintenance and sauerkraut duties.
"In every room, she found something she’d forgotten to tell Themba. Her daily tasklist became a litany of things she should have said to Themba, a constant ache of wondering what he would have thought."
It's a strange age to pick for the protagonist, it's lovely with all of the innocence and naivety you might expect, but the plot gets darker and darker as it goes along and there's a sweet sort of romance and these two elements might have played better with an adult lead. Not that there was anything wrong with how it played out.
I am ok with reading about a ten year old who has mad skills, I live in the country and out here at ten years old many kids are driving around the property and doing chores that most city kids won't learn until they're "grown up" if at all. But I thought it was a bit strange to hear Gemma telling a ten year old that it would be OK for her to strike out on her own for a while, as long as that was what would make her happy. Gemma! No!
The storytelling is quite enjoyable throughout although I noted a few early typos: A missing letter, then a missing word, then a pair of words in swapped order.... before I switched on my text-to-speech engine.
But just before I did there was a goddamn link stuck onto the end of a paragraph. It looks like an out of place sentence but almost fits the context, so I thought "ooh, bonus feature" and clicked it. Don't click it. It's an ad, and I nearly docked a star for that behaviour, but I don't know if it's the author's fault or the website itself, perhaps a quirk of the mobile website.
I recommend checking this out. It took me about an hour to absorb and I enjoyed the whole unique little story.
A free short story available at the above link. This is quite a quirky one and a lot of fun to read. It starts out all cutesy, with our lead actress (a ten year old Lizzie) showing her new best friend (an eight year old Themba) around Sauerkraut Station, her rotating umbrella home of 228 walls, wayyy out in the Oort Cloud.
Here on the station Lizzie lives with her Momma and her Gemma serving at most "five ships per week in the busy season". Life is generally quiet but always busy with station maintenance and sauerkraut duties.
"In every room, she found something she’d forgotten to tell Themba. Her daily tasklist became a litany of things she should have said to Themba, a constant ache of wondering what he would have thought."
It's a strange age to pick for the protagonist, it's lovely with all of the innocence and naivety you might expect, but the plot gets darker and darker as it goes along and there's a sweet sort of romance and these two elements might have played better with an adult lead. Not that there was anything wrong with how it played out.
I am ok with reading about a ten year old who has mad skills, I live in the country and out here at ten years old many kids are driving around the property and doing chores that most city kids won't learn until they're "grown up" if at all. But I thought it was a bit strange to hear Gemma telling a ten year old that it would be OK for her to strike out on her own for a while, as long as that was what would make her happy. Gemma! No!
The storytelling is quite enjoyable throughout although I noted a few early typos: A missing letter, then a missing word, then a pair of words in swapped order.... before I switched on my text-to-speech engine.
But just before I did there was a goddamn link stuck onto the end of a paragraph. It looks like an out of place sentence but almost fits the context, so I thought "ooh, bonus feature" and clicked it. Don't click it. It's an ad, and I nearly docked a star for that behaviour, but I don't know if it's the author's fault or the website itself, perhaps a quirk of the mobile website.
I recommend checking this out. It took me about an hour to absorb and I enjoyed the whole unique little story.