Well, I like the title; it’s dissonant and therefore attention grabbing.

**Prose**

Being completely honest here, your prose was very cumbersome; it’s filled with unnecessary wordage. Some repetition is healthy, sure, but not the amount here. Not only does it make it tiresome, but it also distracts and takes away from what you really try to emphasize. When you repeat that she hates reading, the power of repetition has long been beaten into the dirt. It also distracts from the power of commiseration with your character. Your character is a little girl who’s bullied and has issues at home, it’s a circumstance that lends itself to sympathy, but when the prose is verbose, your story is reduced to a wallowing self-pity that is unenjoyable to read.

Start with CTRL F’ing “just” and deleting most if not all of them. Search “all” and “right” and “so” to rethink some of those as well. Search “perfect\[ly\]\[ion\]” and think about diversifying that particular term.

You begin too many sentences

**Mrs. Welberry**

I actually liked the characterization of this teacher. She reminded me of Miss Trunchbull from the movie, Matilda, minus the tendency towards physical violence. In some respect, she felt like a character with agency who was navigating the world independently from June. On the other hand, her focusing on June did feel a little unnatural. Like she was being used as a vessel to create sympathy for June, considering all June did was touch the top of her chair. All in all though, nice job with her.

**Description**

I thought you had some good moments of description. I found the entire paragraph beginning with, ‘My Mom,’ to be quite evocative. Nice job there.

Sometimes, descriptions of actions by characters were provided that weren’t necessary. If the action doesn’t add anything meaningful about them, or doesn’t help move the scene along, it may be worth cutting. Take the following example:

*‘She sighed and flicked her palms up at the ceiling, ordering us all to stand.’

**General Comments**  
  
Thanks for submitting! This story read as a slice of life that had the potential to be intriguing but didn’t fully reach said potential. Interesting elements (e.g., June’s home life, teddy bear hammer to ward off bad people), weren’t expanded on and left to the very end. Throughout the story, I never felt any sort of stakes. The writing style, while seemingly intentional, was often bloated and left me having to re-read sections to understand. All in all, this story read as a piece that had tons of potential.  
  
**Opening Paragraph (Sentence)**  
  
Right off the bat, I found the phrase, “the bell shakes everything still,” to be confusing. Inanimate objects won’t suddenly stop moving because of the noise, and everything following this piece of information is referring to people going still (teacher stops history lesson, students sit quietly in their seats). So, wouldn’t it make more sense for the bell to shake everyone still?   
  
As a whole, there i

Overall I found the piece interesting, but I was more engaged by the actual language, prose itself than the character. In fact I almost found the teacher's character or the other students more interesting. 

There is a lot of language that I would not expect from a child. "Lucky fucks" for example. "Quick-draw" No way an elementary school aged child knows what a quick-draw is unless they are a super genius. 

It definitely felt like a unique piece of writing, but did not put me on the edge of my seat. I'm a sucker for flowery language, but I will say that I'm sure that other people that critique will comment on an over-usage of it. Often you use two-three words in a sentence when one will do. Lots of fat to trim. 

Hook: Good hook in terms of the title, not so much in terms of opening paragraph. 

Plot: The plot was perhaps my least favorite part of your story. Your character was not particularly likable, or unlikable. She's a child, so you have to really give her some interesting quir

Title:

I didn’t realise this until after the first read through, but “teddy hammer” is a twist on “teddy bear”. This is an interesting way to signal that the character is abnormal: where other children have a teddy bear, she has a teddy hammer—which she intends to use as a weapon. I think this is a pretty cool use of objects to describe the character.

That being said, I didn’t know what “teddy hammer” was supposed to mean until you started talking about the literal hammer. Up until then I thought it might somehow refer to Theodore Roosevelt, because the first sentence mentions Kennedy and that primed my mind to think about U.S. presidents.

Hook:

There wasn’t a hook, and I think you need one.

You could start the story just a few moments back and show the teacher giving the children a warning about a predator who was seen skulking around the neighbourhood, and about how parents have been asked to pick up their children instead of allowing the children to walk home. Then the school b

Hello everyone, this is part one of a three part short story series I'm working on. Not really sure what genre it would be but here's a brief description: Due to the short comings of her parents, a little girl is forced walk to school, then from school back home, all by herself. Forced to protect herself with what little she has.

[My Teddy  Hammer](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15G-uDtfYZav3u83JkX3xISRnBxOmQ2l-3vUfYhLtG64/edit?usp=sharing)

&amp;#x200B;

[\[4228\] Something's Growing in Rosanna](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/w5eo2n/comment/ih9gl5g/?context=3)

[\[1039\] California Dreaming](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/xe8rkm/comment/iohimyy/?context=3)

[2276] My Teddy Hammer