Response to Once in a Lifetime

The story was about a girl who is looking back at a time of her life. She remembers seeing the members of a family that her family was friends with off. Years later, the same family friends return and ask to live with the narrator’s family. The girl has to give up her room, something she isn’t too excited about at first. The family arrives and the girl and her parents are amazed to see how much they have changed. The friends have become more “American,” which the girl and her parents aren’t too happy about. She sees the boy she’d known years before and notices how much he’s changed over the years. She becomes enamored with him, causing her to forget all of the other crushes she’d have since then. As the days pass with the house guests, the host family becomes more irritated with the way their guests have become: self-indulgent and wasteful. The narrator is eventually taken out to the woods behind, where her friend reveals that his mother is actually dying. She breaks down crying but never tells her parents. Eventually, the other family moves out and the girl’s family never learns about the mother’s illness.
    The story was told from first person, a nice perspective which gave great insight to the girl’s personal thoughts and just how awkward she felt with the other family invading her home. There are long paragraphs taking up the bulk of the story with lots of details. The detail is nice but at the same time it can at times be a bit excessive and starts to feel a bit tiring the further you read through the story. It also seems strange that a story written from an Indian perspective makes very few cultural notes when they say that the other family has become American.