Chapter 23: The Breakthrough

Yay review day!!!! Go green! XD

Oh my goodness. This is such a beautiful chapter. Just. Wow. Bravo!!!

“I don’t get it.” Iris says, squinting while Thea and I chortle.

"Chortle" just doesn't seem right here. A different word would be better. Idk just trust me on this. It just doesn't read well. First nitpick? Check. XD

Thea’s brow furrows. “What’s Carina’s last name?”

Second nitpick? The furrowing brow is back. Again lol. You're just getting a little redundant with that. No problem; easily fixable.

“It’s okay.” I say, forcing a smile, “No harm done.” When she doesn’t look convinced I add, “So, Iris. I took your advice and I’ve been meditating right before I try magic, but I’m still struggling too…”

“Billie,” Thorin says, waving his hand in front of my face, “Are you alright?”

Needs a divider of some sort. Since you switched scenes I notice you did that in a more recent chapter. Just need it here

I loved it when Billie preformed her magic in the study room. But I was also pretty confused. She was all frustrated and failing and then all of a sudden she could make this huge orb of magic?? What happened? I mean I know they yelled at each other and she cried.. And it was great, dialogue and everything. But then she could do all that magic?? It just doesn't make sense. You'll wanna clarify that for us.

Other than those couple things it was hard to find mistakes or anything. Well done.

Haha yes I read this forever ago.

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Hi! Cricket here for a review!

Seeing as I haven't read any of the other chapters (I don't think at least. I read a lot of stuff on YWS. xD) I won't be able to help you much in terms of plot and character development. I'll try and focus on other spots in your writing.

Iris, I learn, is shy until you put a book in front of her and ask her about it, then she won’t be quiet. Not that I mind, she has a lot of useful tips.

This is something that I see all throughout this. Your sentences are stiff! I think the main problem is you're mainly just telling and not showing. Show and don't tell is something soo hard in writing, but it's really important. You see if you tell us what a character's like/or how they react to something, then that character isn't going to appear as real to us. They will appear stiff, and overall not give us a very good picture. I'd suggest researching it a bit, and maybe trying to find examples of showing and telling as well, and then comparing the two, to see the difference. Will help you differentiate from the two, I think.

“I don’t get it.” Iris says, squinting while Thea and I chortle.

Now the next thing I noticed is that you are going into your dialogue tags using an incorrect form of punctuation. When going into a dialogue tag, you place a comma after the dialogue, not a period. So it would look like this... "I don't get it," Iris says, squinting while Thea and I chortle.[/i] That's how you do it with dialogue tags. Hope that was helpful!

“Billie, I’m sorry for…for the way I treated you

The ellipsis... it's such a pain to get right! Something that I learned not too long ago, is that you always have a space after an ellipsis. So space after for.

Where is this sudden upheaval of remorse coming from?

This is a little train of thought that I found. One thing I did notice, is that you don't do any way of differentiating between thought and the rest of the story. Given that, there really isn't that much thought, but still... when doing thought, you should really place it in italics, so that the reader isn't confused. That way also, you don't have to put a tag onto the end of it to say that they were thinking. xD

cuz we're all of different races."

:OOOO Text talk?! Was this intentional or something?... xD

One thing I'd like to mention is your quotation marks. There are many that are either not there, not close enough to the speech, or going in the wrong direction. Seeing as it's not that big of a problem, I wouldn't worry about it too much. But a quick edit would be handy in the future when doing the second draft.

I pinch my eyebrows together,

I notice you use this description quite a bit when describing. Also, you use smirk and a few others. I'd really warn against using sooo many facial descriptions. Obviously, they are necessary at times, but not when doing dialogue really. Not in my opinion at least. One thing I noticed, is that it drew away from the dialogue and forced me to try and draw up a picture in my mind of what that face was looking like. It has highly distracting. I'd suggest trying to smooth is over a little. Maybe one or two descriptions every now and then should be fine. Try and keep it down a bit and you should do great.

Also, before I move on. About the facial expressions again. One thing I have learned in the past, is to never switch the facial expressions too quickly, or else it will jar the reader. For instance, I was once writing this story of mine, and I got in huge trouble from a reviewer, for taking the facial expressions and just switching back and forth with them, as to try and keep reminding the reader what they looked like and such. As a result, the reviewer thought that the characters were having multiple personalities, not to mention she said it was highly irritating. Get what I mean?

"I don’t know where the words are coming from.I don’t remember thinking them,but now that they’re here, then won’t stop.

Some spacing issues here. For one, this isn't part of the dialogue and there's a quotation mark from the previous sentence directly next to it. After that, there's a space missing between the two sentences. And then in the last sentence, after one of the commas there's another space missing.

“Look[color=red],/color] I’m sorry,

Needs a comma there.

“Don’t.” I snarl, “Say. Give. Up.

Here, I had to read and re-read just to try and make sense of what you're trying to say. And then it snapped after about the fourth time. What the problem was, was that there was I snarl right in-between what you were trying to get across to us. That she doesn't want him to say don't give up. I'd suggest placing that dialogue tag at the very end of this sentence.

kicking a desk and sending it sliding backward,

Would she really be able to do that? How big and heavy are these desks exactly?

OK, from what I can see this is a magic based kind of book. Where they're tested for their skills and evaluated for it as well. Ohh, and can I see a bit of romance coming as well? xD That was truly beautiful when she cried into his shoulder. Absolutely lovely.

One thing I would suggest working on a little bit would the description of this. Most of it seemed rather flat and just telling mainly. Try and bring it up with some vibe, using the Five Senses mainly. I mean, you use sight a lot of course, and that's sometimes OK. But it doesn't give a very good picture if you just use sight. Try out sound, smell, touch, and taste. Gives a vivid picture for us to see through.

From what I can see, that's all I can help you on! Good luck!

Keep writing!

~Cricket