Young Writers Society

Hi, Dragon. Sorry for the delay!

This chapter has a lot of strengths. There's a good amount of humour and your prose style remains solid. You get in a bit of backstory about Crystall and Caen, which I like, and you seem to be establishing a nice unit of characters too. I haven't really got any nitpicks to focus on in this review.

However, I can't lie. I was actually a bit let down by this installment. Because of the lack of nitpicks, I'm going to focus this review on plot and realism and character rather than meagre grammar problems. I'll talk you through the things that need looking at.

1) Conflict resolution. I think I've said to you before that, as a writer, you have a bad habit of maintaining the status quo too much. You introduce problems and conflicts only to resolve them very quickly, often with minimal effort. What happens in this chapter is a key example. As a reader, I was sure that Crystall's disappearance was linked to the wider question of what was happening to the centaurs, and that it was going to span into a long-term conflict that would affect every inch of Katrina's life. I was genuinely excited to find out what would happen next. However, in this chapter, you resolve everything by having her find him at the ice rink. It's a big anti-climax. It makes me wonder what the point of his disappearance was at all, beyond being a way to bring Caen into the story.

Because you've resolved it so quickly, you've squandered the potential it had. If Crystall had remained missing, and if the cause for his disappearance had been something serious, we could've seen Katrina torn between two areas of her life. I thought she might've been faced with some serious dilemmas - imagine if she'd had to miss out on training and tournaments in order to help Crystall, sacrificing her skating dreams in the process. But she doesn't have to make any sacrifices because everything comes up roses if she just waits long enough.

This doesn't work in a story. Stories need conflict, and the resolution of each conflict has to change the course of the plot, often throwing new problems into the mix. In the book Northern Lights, the protagonist solves the problem of living with a manipulative and controlling woman by running away from her. In doing that, she finds herself alone on the streets of an unfamiliar city, then almost gets kidnapped. She is rescued from the kidnappers by people she knows, and those people then take her north to meet with a king, which throws out new twists and turns in the plot. The resolution of each plot arc leads into a new one. Solving a conflict should move the story forward, not return it to the same place it was in. This is the issue that you really need to focus on.

2) Realism. This isn't really a huge issue in this chapter, all things considered. However, it isn't even remotely feasible that Crystall could land a double axel after a few days of training. It'd be like learning to do a double pike a week after starting gymnastics. It takes years to reach that standard, and to act like it doesn't undermines Katrina's ability as well as being unrealistic. If you want Crystall to show really good potential, maybe show him getting to grips with a beginners' skill far quicker than anyone would expect. No jumps. It can take years to learn even single jumps, let alone doubles.

3) The opening conversation with Caen and Katrina doesn't marry that well with the end of the previous chapter. It feels like a slightly altered repeat, not a continuation. Read the chapters in succession and see if you can tighten the transition.

That's all I'll say for this review. The only issue that needs desperate attention is the first one I mentioned. Work on that conflict. Don't be afraid to crush the status quo into the ground. That's what stories are about, after all.

Hope this helped! If anything I said is unclear, feel free to ask me about it.

Keep writing!
~Pan

Yassss this is still in the Green Room! Obvs that's less good for you but when I'm only doing one a day it's nice to keep my kotgr thread nice and healthy

Nit-picks and nice moments:

“The only time I don’t know what I’m doing is when I say I want to vote for UKIP, now follow me.”

Crystall’s voice broke like the British Empire (Don’t judge my comparisons)

Well, it’s great to meet you, Zayn!

(A good example of this kind of hug would be me and Ashley Chen at a Figure Skating ball)

Hey there DragonNoir. It's just Lizzy dropping by real quick, so without a further ado, let the reviewing begin.

I haven't read any of the previous chapters but I saw this in the green room and it looked fun to try out. This set of comments is coming from the first read so they'll be a bit wonky at first. My overall thoughts on the chapter so far have been pretty positive and nothing has really tripped me up. It's a good length for keeping the reader's attention and you don't have any walls of text. (or too small of sections either) These are all good things so far and I'm going to continue with them a few paragraphs down but first some criticism since this is a critique after all.

In the first paragraph, your last two lines start out exactly the same way and are rather short which bothered me. If you had possibly distanced them more or better emphasized the second use, it would look better. I know exactly why you were using the double there but when it's read out, it doesn't blend with the expectation of meaning that you wanted. Either solution that you're looking at here involves combing those two sentences together. You could cut one of the usages or implement some italics. Both give off relatively the same effect and get you closer to what you're looking for.

A minor thing that bothered me was the colon in the middle of the italic thoughts. (Also great use of italics for thoughts and not using dialogue format.). To me, when you just have two things and you're conveying them in that way, a comma would serve better. The colon brings up formality and more seriousness, while the comma here would just ease you into the next point. This is such a minor thing but it was really bothering me for some reason.

Caen just popped up and I was like "who the heck is that?" Granted I should have read the previous chapter where this was picking up from but even so it brings up a good point in my mind. Even when you have loyal readers following through your works, this could still be a bit of a spring. Because that previous chapter was left behind and now you've set a new scene. The characters can be slightly reintroduced to this new scene and search rather than tossing some guy out and automatically have him to into philosophical thoughts. The jumps that you're making between ideas need the most work here.

The "don't judge my vocabulary" line was sort of fourth wall cracking. You have the character speaking directly to the audience of the book, which is a fun thing to do but also riskiy. And since it's not a realization of the outside world, it didn't phase me that much. I just thought it was something that I would point out to you since it doesn't fit that well with the rest. This may be the time to rework it as a thought of the character.

I skipped to the end because I saw that reallt fun line. It amused me, it caught my attention and before I had even read the chapter, it made me want to read the next. This is as good of a quality as a strong start because it triggers the continued attention of the reader. Now it's just time for me to go back and read the rest of it.

"The two centaurs" how much did I miss? "Nate" time to crack some jokes about conspiracy theories and our grand leader. Gosh I hope that centaurs is magically a term about ice skaters or now I'm going to have to go back and read the rest of this. It made me laugh really hard when I got there and also questioj everything that I have known about the characters so far. The ending is great and I will most likely be back for the next chapter(s).

That's all for now.
Good day and good luck.
~Lady Lizz