“The Mullet Girls”: A Rhetorical Essay

The story begins by giving background information on the narrator and her family. She describes her memory of a specific summer spent at the beach in North Carolina. At 13 she was dividing her time between sun bathing and fishing. The family spends the summer in a sleepy little beach town and every year is just like the last. Except this year, the arrival of two women at the cottage change everything. The narrator gives these women the nickname “Mullet Girls” because when the arriver asking for her father they produce mullet that they promised to Johnny, the father. The Mullet Girls show up again later that evening and look as if they weren’t expecting to find an entire family waiting. They were obviously expecting to find Johnny alone and it was as if he had acknowledged the temptation and politely turned it down.

I enjoyed the story and liked the flow it provided. The information given in the story was in great detail. No matter what the topic, it was described completely until you could almost smell the salt in the air. It seemed as if there was a lot of non-relative information that had nothing to do with the mullet girls. In fact I felt as if the part of “The Mullet Girls” was very small and that the real story was what was happening all around the scenes involving them. It was wonderful how everything the author noted grabbed my attention and I wanted to know everything she had written about it there. She really clarified the picture I created in my mind. After reading this I am very interested in finding more work by this author. Just to find out how all her stories turn out. Whether they are childhood memories or purely imagined.