Young Writers Society

Hello. Here is my review.

Preface
Reviews are a funny thing, especially when you find one from a year ago that you had intended to write, but never did; and it just sits there gathering dust when you happen upon it again when you're just casually browsing through things. And then, when you finally decide to write it, you find yourself on your third intro because you took so long to actually sit down and type the darn thing that your other opening bits are no longer relevant.

Yeah...

It's funny until it happens to you.

Well that went off to nowhere (about a third of that was written with the voice of Robin Williams in my head, I'll give you an imaginary brownie point if you can figure out which portion it was). Let's begin shall we?

Bad

Logic

Other people have mentioned this so I will only mention it in brief here, but I don't feel that Cody behaves as a child in his position really would, while I understand the need for dramatic license (and the fact that a screaming child would ruin the entirety of the scene), I feel it is something you might want to consider in the future or while writing or editing.

My second point is this:

“It means there’s a bomb under your library."

While this gives a nice bit of drama (I'll go into how this fact is made slightly irrelevant in my 'other' section, if your interested in looking at that) I find it very hard to believe that they just happened to teleport to a building that just so happens to have a bomb under it (I would also take the fact that Wenton now how to diffuse it in a similar light, but he's clearly some sot of scientist, so I can suspend my disbelief there), I suspect I am either forgetting something from the previous chapter (it's been a been a year (and a heck of year at that), give me a break!), or this is just convenience. If the former is the case than disregard this, if it is the latter, however, I would recommend adding some sort of for shadowing or explanation as to how they would end up in front of this specific building.

My final point is that the Maria seems far too calm about all this: what would you do if you found a man with a child and a bloody nose, how would you react? This is much like my first point though, and I understand if you were intentionally edging realism.

dialogue
This section is rather small, since I only have one bit to focus on here, there isn't too much dialogue here and most of it is good, even the bit I'm going to focus on isn't necessarily bad, but I'll get into that with the bit.

Speak of the devil, here it is now!

“My grandmother more than me,” Cody shrugged, “Some nights, when the windows are getting hammered by the rain, she’ll get me on her lap and say, ‘Remember your history, Cody, never forget it. Because history’s had enough idiots in it without you becoming one of them too.’”

Now, as I mentioned earlier, this bit isn't necessarily bad (I actually think it does a rather good job of incorporating imagery into dialogue (the "when the windows are getting pounded by rain" part is what I'm thinking of) without it sounding too unnatural), it seems far too mature and collected to be from a child. I went on a tangent earlier about how I don't think the child character behaves realistically here, but I understand the need for dramatic licences and how having a screaming child in the scene may detract from the atmosphere.

I think the main thing that breaks it for me is where he reminisces about his grandmother, while the general idea of the dialogue is fine: the kid talks about how his grandmother taught him history and we get a moral about how its important to learn history (a sentiment I agree with, but that's neither here nor there), and then we get a bit of input from another character reinforcing the wisdom of the words he's reciting; the scene works, the problem with it, I think, is that this just doesn't sound like how I think a child would speak. Children (off the top of my head I believe Cody is twelve) don't usually sit down and reminisce about the good old days. Really, what I'm trying to say here is that Cody doesn't sound like a kid when he's speaking here, and since he speaks like child through the rest of the work, it stands out as irregular.

Style
As always, I have the most points for this one, so lets get into it.

First some quick grammar:

Wenton fell to the ground, hugging his face and cursing, in a very inclusive manner to all the world religions.

The second comma doesn't need to be there.

there was another description, something involving Wenton's bleeding nose, but I can't seem to find it anywhere in the text, anyway, there's a missing preposition there between 'with' and 'bleeding'

The giant coat she had wrapped around herself didn’t help very much either with the description; so bulky like she had wrapped a mattress around herself.

I'm going to use this description as a transition into more stylistic criticism, since this description has a bit of grammar I'm unsure about and there's a stylistic bit I dislike.

First, I think the semicolon should just be a colon, since this is explaining the preceding description.

second, the bit after the semi-colon is rather awkwardly worded:

so bulky like she had wrapped a mattress around herself.

While this is technically correct (at least I think it it, you might need a comma after bulky, if you were to keep this description otherwise unchanged), I feel there are better ways to write it, maybe something like:

As if she had wrapped a mattress around herself

and now on to the stylistic criticism:

The word was not clipped, but stretched to capacitate the full confusion of seeing his altered surroundings.

First, apparently capacitate is not a word (I only know this because spellcheck says it isn't, you fooled me though), so I would suggest changing it to comprehend, but honestly that's only because the fact that you invented a word might confuse some readers, it's fine with me.

Second, this is very overblown and could use come slimming down; I have a few suggestions:

1: remove all the words after "word" up to "stretched", so it would look something like this:

The word stretched to capacitate the full confusion of seeing his altered surroundings

2: or you could go a step further, change "capacitate" to "comprehended" and get something like this:

the word comprehended the full confusion of seeing his altered surroundings

Alright, on to the next description:

Before him, a figure stood haloed by the luminescent glow of a doorway.

This description really isn't too bad, but I find your use of inverted word order at the beginning unnecessary, maybe just change it to something like:

A figure stood before him, haloed by the luminescent glow of the doorway

well that was quick, let's keep going!

though they weren’t a blurry figure anymore now that Wenton’s eyes had time to focus.

this seems very wordy to me, I may have injected a bit more of my own style into my correction that strictly necessary, but something along the lines of:

Wenton's eyes had focused and he could see the figure more clearly now.

In general, I feel your style could benefit from being lightly more restrained.

Other
the ending to this piece leaves me conflicted, so I think I'll take it from my two warring perspectives: the reader and the critic. perhaps from this you'll be able to figure out a way to reconcile the two, or perhaps you already have and I look like an idiot for not reading ahead (I have feeling about how you might do this, but I'll only go into it if I (a) remember and (b) am incorrect. I'll only mention it in passing in my review of the next part if you do what I think you're going to do.), at any rate, I hope you'll find something useful in this bit.

the reader:
This ending is very underwhelming, we just spent a section with this character only to have her seem to have no importance whatsoever, we almost had a bomb diffusing scene! but then we didn't, and it ended in the same neutral place it began, with no payoff of any kind and little reason to continue reading to the next chapter.

the critic:
While this might not be the most interesting way to end a chapter, I like it; it was a smart decision to have Wenton's standoffish nature make him shoot himself in the foot, potentially leading to disaster because of a tactless comment, it has a nice element of tragedy (again I want to stress I haven't read ahead, so either I'm a genius or your laughing so hard at me making a fool of myself you're in danger of having an aneurysm), which I like. the end of this: placing them back where they began gives this a nice element of circularity, though I wonder how you'll pull this episode into the rest of this emerging narrative.

though this was in my 'bad' section, this was really more of a neutral bit to put out my thoughts on the ending that I couldn't really fit anywhere else (also I felt I had a bit of genuine criticism to give, and I wasn't going to disallow myself the satisfaction of putting it down on pixels.), and it was quite a neat bit to really give you a bit of perspective on some ways to think about your work.

well lets ditch this load of semi-oppressive nonsense for something completely different...well, mostly different (I've literally only watched like five of the episodes of their TV show on Netflix, if I have a token Monty Python reference that people might actually laugh at you can't possibly expect me to leave it can you?).


Good

As always, your humor comes through brilliantly, and barring the few missteps I mentioned, your prose is quite good. a few bits I especially liked were these:

The place, however, was in no way messy, with all the books maintaining the good sense to keep themselves filed away neatly without any paper spilling down onto the floor:

When I read this description I immediately filed it away in my head as one to use in my own writing eventually. I love how you personify the books; the whole of this description has a wonderful air of good humor about it. It reminds me of Gormenghast (or it sounds like something Peake would write, if nothing else), a book which I have mentioned before and will take a moment to recommend again, though I confess I haven't finished it (not because it bored me, more because I have other books on my reading scheduled and I just haven't made it to that one yet), the parts I did read were full of oddity and brilliant description. I think you would find a lot in there to enjoy.

The first word he could think of to describe the woman that stood before him was: cherubic,

While the rest of this description is rather mediocre, this particular part is excellent, specifically, for me at least, because of the word "cherubic", it was an excellent choice it has the kind of melodic archaism that comes with a lot of more obscure words, but with only perhaps a moment's pause we can figure out what you mean. And since we all know what a cherub is, the image this word produces is at once vivid and precise. All that from one word. I don't think I've ever complemented word choice this highly before, but it fascinated me, so I thought I'd talk about it.

Wenton is also an interesting character and he has a memorable personality; your characters in general are quite goo and you portrayal of them is very entertaining, I look forward to reading more about them.


Conclusion

An enjoyable, well humored piece marred by a few stylistic missteps and logical leaps. These, however, will probably go unnoticed under the eyes of a less observant reader, and can be remedied with some small edits (which I personally recommend doing once you finish the work).