Mrs. Kelly's Monster

Mrs. Kelly’s Monster by Jon Franklin is detailed, heart wrenching, suspenseful and inspiring.  The story is about a woman name Mrs. Kelly who is suffering from a tangled knot of abnormal blood vessels in the back of her brain.  Over time the knot has caused her to lose part of her eyesight, hemorrhages, lost her sense of smell, taste, she had seizures, and she smelled a strange odor then started strangling.  It started affecting her legs, and she was partially paralyzed.  She was constantly in pain and didn’t want to deal with it anymore.  The story gives me the feeling that I am in the room while they are doing this operation.  It shows that it is a deadly operation and that anything could go wrong at any moment.

I think that the author does a wonderful job at describing what is going on during the operation.  He seems to know how to catch the reader’s attention and pull them in so that the reader wants to continue with the story until it is done.  The conversation between the doctor and the nurse helped to make the story into a dialogue as well, which I think also contributed to it.     

The thing that makes this a good story is how the story gives the reader the blow-by-blow scene of what is going on during the operation.  I also like how the author uses certain times in every couple paragraphs.  I think the “pop, pop, pop” added a lot of action to the story, it let the reader know the pace of the heart beat while the story went on.  There were great details to describe to the reader that certain things are as well as what is happening with “the monster.”

Franklin approached the story in the right way, he told the story of Mrs. Kelly from how she got “the monster” all the way through her life with it, what it did to her and then to her operation.  I think that this type was perfect for this story because in give the information in such a way that it seems to flow the best when read aloud.  This was a wonderful story, it was very dynamic and it made me want to turn the page and continue but at the same time I didn’t want to find out if something bad was going to happen to Mrs. Kelly.