The Skating Party

Imagine your two favourite people in the world hanging on a cliff. If you could only save one of them, who would it be? It would be a difficult choice but that was Uncle Nathan had to experience in “The Skating Party” by Merna Summers. In story, the protagonist, Maida was being told about the time her uncle, Nathan was engaged to woman named Eunice and we were walked through the events that led up to Nathan ending up never getting married. The story had an interesting plot to dissect, the desire to know more was a page turner for the story, and one of the recurring themes in the story was unpredictable emotions. In the “The Skating Party” by Merna Summers, we learned about Uncle Nathan’s past. In the introduction, we were introduced to Maida who was being told about the time Nathan wanted to get married. The conflict of the story was that Nathan really liked two girls, Delia and Eunice. Nathan discovered that Delia was already married so he decided to pursue a long-lasting relationship with Eunice in the rising action. Eventually, Eunice and Nathan became engaged and had a skating party to celebrate. At the climax of the story, Eunice and Delia went off skating together and fell through the ice. In the falling action, Nathan came in time to save one of them, Delia. Finally in the resolution, Nathan admitted that he was fully aware of who was who and he saved Delia instead of Eunice.

I felt that we weren’t given enough information when we learned that Uncle Nathan simply didn’t save his fiancee. It was really abrupt. I wanted to know Nathan’s perspective rather than Maida’s mom and even though I knew what happened in the end, I needed to know how it ended that way. Nathan fed us information that pieced everything together very gradually which was something the author did really well to keep the suspense and the underlying reason why it made us hooked until the