Hi again, maishaywca! Pan back to review.
Same format as last time. I'll start by reading through the piece and drawing attention to smaller issues, then finish off with my overall thoughts. Grammatical corrections will be shown blue.
She is not in the mood to play outside. She doesn’t like the children. They are often mean to her. They call her “weirdo”. But Zara wouldn't do that. Zara wouldn't call her weird.
I find the sentence structure here very repetitive. Short sentences can be great, but they need to stand out against the rest of the story. Try to vary your sentence length more - connecting some clauses with conjunctions such as 'and' or 'but' or 'so' will allow you to create more diversity. I always remember this source when I talk about sentence length:

It really captures the importance of variation!
Tiana became sad. There are no new books to read.
Your tenses are still a bit inconsistent. 'Became' should be 'becomes', as this story is told in the present tense.
“Oh! Maybe I am thinking too much about Zara. It must be a hallucination. I should go back to sleep.”
Just like I mentioned in the first chapter, I feel like this bit of dialogue only exists to make sure the reader knows what's going on. It sounds quite unnatural to me, not like something a person would really say. I also don't think that someone would say 'it must be a hallucination' in that kind of blasé way - she might be more likely to convince herself that it was a trick of the light, or that she just thought she'd seen something.
She is surprised to what she was holding.
We tend to be surprised at or by things, not surprised to them.
“But how did it come in my hand?
Similarly, I think she'd be more likely to say 'how did it get in my hand?' We don't really use 'come' in this context.
Okie-dokie, that's it for the specifics. I think this chapter is definitely more interesting than the first. The appearance of the girl at the window is intriguing, and I've also been left to wonder about the significance of the dream. I'm glad that we're seeing Tiana's everyday life be disturbed, as that's how you add mystery to a story and draw your readers in.
My biggest pointers for this chapter pertain partially to things that the previous reviewers have mentioned. I do think you really struggle with the show/tell balance. Like Sujana says, there isn't anything wrong with having tell-heavy stories, especially if you have a sort of fairytale vibe going on. However, you still need to make sure that we get something else other than the bare facts. Like Blue says, the narrative feels very dry because the reader is made to feel like an outsider. We don't get much specific insight into what Tiana can see, hear and feel.
I also think the dryness is largely due to the sentence structure issues I've mentioned earlier. If English isn't your native language, I completely understand that changing up your sentence types might be a bit of a challenge, but it's absolutely crucial to keeping the reader interested. If the structure of the writing is monotonous, the whole story feels monotonous. As far as correcting this goes, it really just comes down to you expanding and developing your knowledge of sentence types by reading and writing as much English as you can. It isn't going to happen overnight, but if you keep at it you will improve. For now, I think you should definitely focus on connecting some of your sentences with connectives like 'and', 'but', 'because' and 'so' - words like that will give your story more of a sense of progression. Without anything to link them, the events of the story feel unconnected and aimless. Connectives will help us get a better sense of cause and effect.
As a final point, I feel like you need to develop Zara's character a lot more. Even though she isn't physically present within the story, we should still be able to learn about her personality through how Tiana thinks of her. At this point, you're sort of claiming that Zara was an amazing friend to Tiana without actually giving me evidence. What was their friendship actually like? What was Zara like? How did the two girls differ; what did they have in common? What specific memories does Tiana have of Zara? You don't need to answer these questions all at once, but they should be woven into the narrative. If we're going to care about Tiana's connection to Zara, you need to actually show their friendship, perhaps through flashbacks or just moments of reminiscence on Tiana's part. Just telling us that they were close isn't enough to convince me.
That's all I have to say for now! I hope this helped. I do think this chapter is a step in the right direction, as it introduces far more interesting plot developments and actually leaves me with some questions, but you need to work on varying your sentence structure and showing as well as telling. Neither of those issues are quick fixes, but they can be improved upon with practice.
Keep writing!

~Pan
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Reviews: 370
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