Young Writers Society

Interesting excerpt; very gritty narrative. I'm curious to know why Lilli's father is being convicted.

So far, mine only major qualm is that Lilli hasn't displayed much, if any, personality. That said, I would like to see more moments and conversations that show Lilli's personal traits and interests. As she is now, she is very one-dimensional, due to her reticence.

Also, whom are Jensen and Mark?

The only character I really care about right now is Cate, since frankly, she's been given a lot more attention than Lilli.

Lastly, what city do they live in? Is the setting real, or fictional?

See mine (notes) and /*edits*/ below.

The city was a slaughterhouse. Lilli was all elbows, pushing through the crowd in a desperate struggle for space to breathe, every step bringing her closer to the meat grinder at the city’s core. It would chop her up and some unsuspecting /*tainted*/ soul (that sounded a little odd to me. Unsuspecting means trusting. Why would a trusting soul devour another? Since Lilli is the hypothetical prey, it would make more sense to call HER unsuspecting) would eat her for dinner—compliments to the chef. An overcrowded, cannibalistic slaughterhouse, (redundant. The prior context clues already indicate this) and /*And*/ the air tasted like exhaust to boot.

The girl (too damn vague. I would only use such an impersonal label for a character unimportant to the plot) /*Lilli*/ pursed her lips and followed suit with her rolling luggage. She couldn’t imagine a world where Cate had stayed with her dad; it was too far beyond reality. “I know. Is it always this bad?” she asked as the crowd split for a dog-walker.

A tiny snap echoed in her ears, and she glanced over to see Cate gnawing at the edge of her thumbnail. The woman straightened up and went pale. “Sorry.” She wiped her hand against her dark slacks, her lazy smile suddenly (too clichéd) strained on her face. “Bad habit. Guess I’ll have to kick it now. Just, you know… It’s a big change. Guess I’ll have to lock up the vodka, too,” she joked.

An arm wrapped around her shoulders, and her tears were soaked up by the thin cotton of a designer shirt. “It’s alright.” Cate’s voice was lower than she had imagined it, growing up—she had imagined her mother as a gaudy teenager with a valley-girl accent turned up to eleven. “It’s fine,” Cate murmured, “cry it out. I can’t imagine…” Her /*Cate's*/ fingers twisted in Lilli’s hair, and the girl (too damn vague) /*Lilli*/could have sworn she heard tears being choked back. “We don’t have to do the mom-daughter stuff right away, if you don’t want. It’s a big change, and a big shock, and we’ve both got a lot to get used to.”

Hi Lareine! You can thank @Holysocks for recommending your novel to me as one to follow! I'm making an effort to review regularly this year so do please add me to your tag list when you post new parts! Might take me a few weeks to catch up, but I'm excited to follow.

You've got a really interesting start here. The relationship between Lilli and her mother is an odd one, which always makes for good fiction. I think you'll get a lot of mileage out of this mother who is new to motherhood with a teenage daughter, and the teenage daughter who clearly doesn't feel like she needs to be mothered. I did have a lot of questions about them though. For one, I didn't realize that Cate was Lilli's mother until halfway through the scene. From the way she was introduced in the conversation, I assumed Cate was a step-mother or girlfriend who Lilli had grown close to. This is totally different than an estranged mother who has been absent all of Lilli's life. So, just think about the way you introduce her to the reader! Try to aim for an introduction that makes it clear who she is in relation to Lilli. Oh, and I also didn't know that Cate had been so long estranged from Lilli and her father until I read your response to another review. That's important information for the reader's understanding of Lilli and this presumably important relationship!

Your descriptions of the world and crowded city are vivid and clear, which is excellent. It made it easy to follow these women through the space, and it's always more fun to read a story with an interesting world. I did wonder about the slaughterhouse description at first, though. It sets this city up as a grimy, dangerous place that the rest of the scene didn't uphold. The rest of the scene works to establish it as a pretty real-world-based city, presumably a financial district with lots of white collar workers milling about. Then, Cate's apartment building is described as very high-end which makes me wonder about that initial description. Is this story set in the real world, or a fantasy world? Is the slaughterhouse description one based in Lilli's perception of the city, having grown up somewhere else (like the country?). The slaughterhouse description is just incredibly visceral and leaves the reader with an immediate picture of the city. It's a great description, but just be sure you're giving your reader an accurate idea of your world since the first description of something is often the one that sticks most clearly in your head.

I can tell that this chapter is broken into several parts to help with length, so I'll wait on making general chapter comments until I've finished the entire movement. I do wonder, though, if this is the strongest open to a novel. From what I've read so far, I would assume that this is a realistic novel about a mother and daughter seeking to repair a broken relationship. However, since I can see it's also tagged as science fiction this is clearly not all the story is going to be about! It's a good rule of thumb to give the reader a sense of what the plot will be as close to the beginning as possible, because otherwise we're just left wandering around hoping you're an author worth trusting until something can ground us.

Other ways to establish trust, if there is story that absolutely must be told to ground the reader before the plot begins, are to ground us entirely in a character. Right now, we know nothing about Lilli other than she's just moved in with her mother. What can you tell us about her to make her unique, or to make us empathize with her? A strong, relateable character can often do enough to establish trust with a reader as they wait for the plot to begin. Which, again, is best to do as close to the beginning as possible!

All in all, I'm definitely interested to see where this goes!

Keep writing!

--Lauren

This is Nikayla here for a review!

As you know, I'm not the best at reviewing prose, but I'll jump right into the review and try the best I can. I really enjoyed the sensory detail that's implemented in the very first paragraph and it does a great job at pulling the reader into the story and making them feel immersed. It imbues an image that sets up so much in only a paragraph. The one thing that was a little confusing is the transitioning between the first and second paragraph because at first I thought Cate was in a different place than Lilli, but that was just my mistake.

The first lines of dialogue are ones that I enjoy, but it does feel a tiny bit stiff at first with Cate, but it begins to grow on me as it goes on. Like Holly, I can see how this can be thought of as a fantasy world--but, I think you did well enough at setting it in the real world. From my first interpretations. I was either thinking that Cate and Lilli were step-siblings or that Cate was older than Lilli in the sense that Cate had planned to get together with Lilli's father but it didn't end up working out.

I really like Cate's character, especially the dialogue you use to build that character up. She seems to be the more talkative one out of the two and she kind of reminds me of a grumpy old person. At this point in the story, we don't really know who Jensen is, but I'm going to assume that it's Lilli's father?

It could also be someone else, but I also enjoy that the mention of the name is subtle and plays out like an actual scene would rather than using context clues as to who they are so early on. Further into the story I realized that it was the latter idea with Cate being Lilli's mother, but at this point we don't know on what circumstances she is. If they divorced a long time ago or if this is something more recent. I'm thinking that Lilli is in her teens at this point, and I'm kind of thinking early teens as well because she does seem a little uncomfortable around Cate.

I think I enjoy Cate so much because she's raw and she reminds me of my mom and feels like such a real character. There is a line that interests me because we don't know about it yet, and that's,

If he didn’t get to her first.

Oh my word. Wow. I like. (I'm going to attempt to do this on mobile so hopefully this works)

First off, when you started off with the line about the slaughterhouse, IMMEDIATELY I could smell that awful burning-bone smell that happens when the big saws cut through it. And the flesh. It was definitely a clear image, and it made me really excited that I was feeling all these things so soon in your story- which is the way I think it SHOULD be. My point is, you did that all fabulously.

Honestly, the only critiquing I have for this chapter today, is I did find a little confusing at times. As much as I liked the opening image, it took me awhile to realize this was modern earth, and not a fantasy world. I don't know why, I think it's because the beginning picture of her shoving through a crowd- I guess I tend to think of crowds as... "Uncivilized" for lack of a better word, and so my mind takes me to a realm where there's a corrupt monarchy and an angry/afraid mob.

I also was kind of confused about Lilli's relationship with Cate for awhile- until Cate mentioned the mother daughter things. And I know we WERE told eventually what the relationship was, but I still felt like I was trying to figure out for the majority of the first part what was happening between them. I'm not sure if this is a bad thing or a good thing, but something that might make it a little less confusing is just to have Lilli have a little more internal dialogue about who this lady is- just 'cause it DID feel a bit like I wasn't being introduced to the characters (in the sense where your friends don't introduce you to a friend of theirs they just bumped into at the mall- not in the sense where we don't have a beautifully illustrated picture of the characters <3 )


I really like this. Again, the setting is so clear, the characters are so defined, the plot is even quite intriguing. This beginning is what I look for in published works, and seldom find.

Keep it up, Lare! And keep me posted!!!

-Holy

You do have a knack for building up worlds, introducing the scene, and painting a pretty picture with the tone in your characters.