I'm not overly happy with this chapter so any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Chapter 3
After lunch, Carter led Emmy to the music room. Compared to some of the other classrooms she’d seen, it almost seemed small compared to some of the other rooms Carter had shown her, but Emmy figured it could still hold at least 60 people if it needed to. Three large windows looked out onto the grounds, with the river just visible behind them. The floor was wood-panelled, not carpeted like most of the other rooms Emmy had seen, but the blue-flamed hourglass had been painted in the centre of the room. Music stands stood everywhere in a sort of clearly organised chaos and beside them were instruments. Guitars left beside small stools, violin and viola cases in neat piles along the wall nearest the door, or abandoned by the stands, flutes and trumpets left on chairs, it was quite the sight.
“Strings, woodwind and brass tend to chill in here,” Explained Carter, wheeling himself further in, “Two drum kits in there” He pointed to a large door on the right, “And the grand piano is in there.” Almost on cue, as he pointed to the smaller door on his left, soft music began to filter into the room. It was a duet, that Emmy could tell, piano and guitar, but she’d never heard it before. It was beautiful. Carter smiled and pushed the door open quietly.
The pianist was identical to Carter in almost every way. The same hair, the same build, the same posture, the same eyes, everything. His clothes differed slightly, in that while he was wearing the same jeans, he had a dark blue t-shirt in place of a hoodie, but other than that, there was no difference between the two.
On his left sat a smaller, lighter-skinned girl with a guitar in her lap. Her long black hair was tied up in a ponytail and her eyes were closed as she played. A pale blue summer dress hung off her loosely while her shoulders and arms were covered by a thin cardigan. The two played in perfect harmony and Emmy found herself hanging off every note. When the piece finally came to an end, the boy that Emmy assumed was Calvin looked up with a smile.
“RJ, it seems we had an audience.” The girl jumped slightly, but visibly relaxed when her eyes landed on Carter.
“Ay Dios mio Calvin, I thought it was a teacher or something!” Her voice had a distinct accent and Emmy couldn’t help but smirk.
“A fellow American, I’m guessing?” She asked, drawing a laugh from the other girl. The two musicians stood and walked over, with the girl extending her hand first.
“Raven Jessica Martín, LA born and raised.” She said with a smile.
“Emilia Winters, I’m a Miami girl myself.” The two girls laughed as they shook hands before Calvin cleared his throat.
“Oh, she knows who you are!” Carter said in an amused voice, “Unless there’s another kid identical to me.” Calvin slapped Carter’s arm before facing Emmy.
“Ignore him, he lives to wind me up. Calvin, the honour is mine.” For a second, Emmy swore Calvin’s eyes changed colour and she shook her head quickly.
“It’s nice to meet you both.” She smiled.
“Raven, could you show Emmy the dorms?” Carter asked, “I’m supposed to go and see Eldritch again and I can’t actually show her the dorms anyway for...obvious reasons.” He gestured to his whole body with a smirk, causing Raven to smack the back of his head, then roll her eyes as he laughed.
She turned to Emmy, “Come on, I’ll show you where you’re sleeping.”
Emmy followed Raven up a wide, winding staircase with a blood-red carpet. The windows were thin arches, through which small beams of sunlight could squeeze through.
“The dorms are separated by grade,” Explained Raven, “Well, “year” as they call it here. You’re in Year 12, so you’ll be staying in the West Wing with me.”
At the top of the staircase was a large oak door which Raven pushed open with a smirk.
Emilia’s jaw dropped. The entire room was essentially the common room: large, comfy looking sofas were scattered around, with equally comfy chairs dotted between them. Two large windows took up the entire back wall, allowing the afternoon sun to flood in. To the right, the wall was lined with bookshelves, each one packed with expensive-looking novels. A few students were sat around the room, engrossed in their own work. In a seat by the window, Emmy saw Felicity.
“Door on the left leads to the dorms. Go through there, guys’ dorm is on the left, up the staircase on the right is the girls’.” Raven explained. “Lights out at 11 pm, but you can still hang in the common room after that and....you haven't listened to a word I just said have you?” Raven asked as she followed Emmy’s gaze.
“She seems so sad.” Said Emmy, softly, her eyes focused on the creased forehead and clenched jaw. She turned back to Raven and the other girl gave a somewhat exasperated sigh.
“She's been through some shit. Her brother went missing at the start of the year and a lot of people spread rumours about it. The only person she really talks to anymore is Carter.”
“That's horrible.” Raven just shrugged.
“It happens. Honestly, her whole family creeps me out a little. Her uncle teaches history and he's eccentric as Hell, you've met Eldritch and I'm convinced she sneaks out after lights out. There's just something...off about them, y’know?” Emmy glanced over to Felicity again, this time catching her eye for a split second.
“What was her brother's name?”
“Othero. They were really close." Replied Raven, "She was never too talkative, but after he vanished, it was like she went mute. She barely does anything outside of reading, sketching and going to class."
"What kind of rumours?" Emmy asked, following Raven over to one of the sofas.
"Some people thought that maybe he'd just argued with Eldritch and gotten himself kicked out. Then there were the runaway theories, that he just wanted to get away. And then there were the more...dark theories." Raven glanced around, as if checking no-one was listening in, before leaning in closer and speaking in a near whisper, "Some people think that Eldritch killed him or did something to him. A decent number of people think that Felicity might have killed him."
“Why the hell would anyone think she’d-? She barely looks strong enough to break a pencil!” Emmy whisper-yelled, glancing back over to the girl in question.
“Because…” Raven sighed and leaned in closer, “This stays between us, because if Carter or Calvin find out I told you they will kill me, but when Carter had his accident the only other people there were Calvin and Felicity. The boys don’t talk about it, but that was when Felicity started acting really weird. She didn’t come to school for a month.”
“And people think she had something to do with it?”
Raven nodded solemnly.
"Do you really think she'd do that?" Emmy's tone was incredulous. Raven ran a hand through her hair with a sigh.
"I have no idea what I think, but I know one thing: something isn’t right with that family…”
Edit: This chapter has probably had the most changes out of all of the ones I had already written.
End of chapter
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137,518 Literary Works • 672,040 Reviews
Hey Holly!! Here to bring this out of the green room for you!
Seeing the school should be accompanied by events happening in that part of the school. I'm not going to remember a tour, but I will remember what their room looks like because that's where the juicy part at the end happened. Show us on a need to see basis and focus on the events that will propel the plot forward.
So just a quick note on my review style. I always assume novels chapters are first or second drafts so I usually don't focus on sentence level or grammar things and instead think about bigger picture things I notice.
I obviously don't have the context of the previous chapters here, but my guess is this MC arrived at some kind of school and now she's getting a tour from a cute guy and then strange things are going to happen at this school.
What I liked about this chapter was that you added in some interesting conflict there at the end with the family drama and possible murder and someone is missing. I love me a good mystery!
Something to think about is what you want the main focus of this chapter to be - my guess is introducing this conflict with the family there are the end. That's definitely the juicest and most interesting part! The stuff before it with the tour and everything, not that it's not important (I feel like the characters you mentioned will be relevant throughout the story) but the main meat of the chapter should be that ending part when that conflict is introduced.
I know it's tempting but we don't have to see every part of the school right now
I'll leave things there for now, but let me know if you have any questions or if you'd like feedback about something I didn't mention! I hope you keep working on this story
Hi! Thank you so much for the feedback! While the drama was a big part of the chapter, I was also trying to introduce both Calvin and Raven to the story. I really appreciate the feedback on the ending especially, as that was the part I really wasn't confident with. Thank you again %u263A
Hiya, Holly! I reviewed chapter two of this so I thought I'd swing by and check out this part as well. I'm going to follow the same formula as last time, starting with small comments and rounding off with my overall thoughts. Small grammar/spelling corrections will be shown in blue. Let's go!
Small Comments
How could a room capable of holding sixty people ever be considered small?! You'd be better off saying it was smaller than the other classrooms she'd seen, but still big enough to fit sixty people.
As I mentioned in my last review, remember that dialogue tags shouldn't have capital letters. This should be written as:
“Strings, woodwind and brass tend to chill in here,” explained Carter,
The bit in bold feels redundant, because you've already spelt it out explicitly that they look the same. I found myself thinking 'yeah, okay, they're identical. We get it'.
I wouldn't call this being crude? He's only alluding to the fact that he's a guy, and he's not doing it in a particularly crass way.
What does an 'expensive-looking' novel actually look like? It's better to let the reader infer the expense from their appearance than let them infer the appearance from the expense, if you get what I mean. Description is more evocative when it encourages the reader to build from the ground up. Maybe talk about the books being leather-bound, with gilt lettering and old pages. Give us specifics.
No need for the apostrophe. The lights don't possess the 'out'.
1) When you're using 'hell' as a kind of throwaway expression or a general term for a bad experience, it doesn't need a capital letter. If you're talking about Hell as in the place in the Bible, it does.
2) You're prone to comma splices, which is where you separate two independent clauses with a comma rather than an appropriate full stop or conjunction. I've fixed the one in the above quote, so I'll give you some other examples.
He took an hour to get his stuff together, the rest of us were already packed and ready.
I want to go to go into the city, there's nothing to do here.
She tried to stop me in the street, I carried on walking.
The problem with these sentences is that they both contain a pair of independent clauses - i.e. clauses that could stand alone. However, commas cannot be used to connect independent clauses - that honour goes to full stops, conjunctions, and occasionally semi-colons.
He took an hour to get his stuff together. The rest of us were already packed and ready.
I want to go to go into the city; there's nothing to do here.
She tried to stop me in the street but I carried on walking.
The easiest way to check if you have a comma splice is to swap a comma out for a full stop. If it results in two full sentences that can stand perfectly well alone, then you shouldn't have had a comma there in the first place. If it sounds weird, like this:
Sitting in the chair. I read my book.
Then you don't have a comma splice on your hands, and a comma is the correct punctuation. Read the link above for more information about comma splices and how to fix them, because I've only glossed over the issue here.
'Might have', not 'might of'. They sound very similar when spoken aloud at speed, which is why people confuse them, but 'have' is the standard form.
Overall Thoughts
I think I prefer this chapter to the previous one. It's a little slow to start because we're just following the tail end of the tour and having rooms described to us, but it picks up considerably towards the end. I really liked seeing Raven show Emmy to the dorms and shed some light on Felicity's background. The dialogue was really good towards the end of the chapter, expository but without being obviously so. You've given us what I think was missing from chapter two - a proper, concrete mystery to get our teeth into. I'm intrigued to know why Felicity's brother disappeared. I trust it had nothing to do with Felicity, because she doesn't seem like a nasty character to me, but I wonder if she knows more than she's letting on. Missing relatives always make for a great mystery in fiction. I'm keen to know more.
I'm getting strong Harry Potter vibes and do still worry for the story's originality, but I'm not as concerned as I was. There's definitely some magic in the story somewhere and it's obviously based at a boarding school, but other than that it seems more mystery-orientated than Harry Potter, so it's good that you're diversifying it. I hope and suspect it'll become more original the longer it goes on.
Your description still leaves rather a lot to be desired. It feels like you set the scene with the bare furniture but don't really push the boat out. I'd like to see you use sensory description a lot more than you do. Don't just describe how things look, but describe how they sound and smell. Is the common room quiet but for the rustle of people turning pages? Does it smell of old books or wood? Be specific, as well. Honing in on a few small, precise details about a setting or person is more evocative that just generally describing everything.
In terms of character, I quite like Raven. Her character feels believable - friendly enough, nonchalant about the gossip and rumours spread throughout the school, a little bit judgemental of Felicity and her family. She seems rounded. Emmy still seems slightly blank. At the moment, she's kind of like a vehicle for the reader's questions - she's not really doing anything that marks her personality out. She doesn't even say that much, actually. It's a bit of a concern, because by the third chapter I think we should be getting to know the main character pretty well.
Anything else to add? I don't think so. I did enjoy this chapter, especially the latter half, and I think you're great at weaving in mystery and odd little moments without drawing too much attention to them. Emmy's character needs more individualisation, your description needs development, and you could do with tidying up the punctuation and typos in your piece - there's a few miscellaneous spelling errors throughout. Still, you've got the plotline pinned down pretty well and you're getting more to the heart of the story now. It's got a lot of potential.
Keep writing!
~Pan
Thanks for the review! Punctuation and grammar have never been my strongest points but I am working on it! As for Emmy, I think you might like her a little more when I publish the next chapter (whenever my Internet and personal life decide to chill the hell put long enough for me to finish it %uD83D%uDE05)