Reviewed by Claire

The First Stone is a story of sin and forgiveness...of remembering, and forgetting. When faced with the act of chastising one of his 'flock', a priest remembers his own past 'sins' and childhood punishment and learns a lesson of forgiveness, perhaps to ill effect.

This is a refreshingly 'small' story, in that it deals with a small emotional moment and does not try to cram too much information into a short story as those more inexperienced with the genre tend to do. There are nice moments of description, with a powerful combination of long and short sentences that helped to create a good rhythm in the story.

Sometimes though, I felt the author was trying to be a bit too clever with words and certain parts of the story were a little obscure as a result. Over-use of adjectives is not always a good thing, and there is also an example of over-done (whether on purpose or not) alliteration in the second sentence which I thought needed to be changed. Overall though I felt that the story was building up to be quite interesting but unfortunately, the abrupt ending disappointed me a little.

Story by © Ian H Lester

Reviewed by © Claire

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