Young Writers Society

Hi there Jyva, it's Gymnast2801 here with a review for The Marauders!

Just so you know, I will give my overall thoughts of your work at the end of this review. So...let's get to it!


- James breathed slowly, inhaling and exhaling. In, out. In. Out. He’d been doing it for three minutes now, and yet his heart was still beating faster than a galloping racehorse’s. -
For the 'In, out. In. Out.' I think you should write it like below:
...and exhaling.
In, out.
In.
Out.
He'd been doing...
However, I am not 100% that this is how it should be, just thoughts and ideas
Also, I like your comparison to the racehorse!

- The lamp was unlit, and there was no sound inside the room as he watched the doorway. -
Didn't you just describe that James's breathing was loud? But this sentence is very intriguing!

Well, that was about it! I liked your characters a lot--they seem very complex. It's , my fault for starting in the middle of things that I don't understand everything, but I did understand that Josephine was trying to kill James. I am still pondering why--maybe because he was a murderer himself? Or maybe because Josephine is with some sort of law? These are all good questions for a reader to have because it keeps them motivated to keep reading so great job on that!
I think you could also work a bit on your descriptions of both the characters and their surroundings. I gathered that there was a bunk bed with sheets but that's about it. And there was no description of James at all. But again, I've started in the middle so maybe you've already described them somewhere else? But the surroundings should definitely be described more.

Overall, I quite liked this work and might even review some more of it!
Please keep on writing!
-Gymnast2801

This is Kaos here for a review!

Something that I wanted to point out that I don't know if it has or not before is that this is an awkward way to post? I don't know why you're only posting an excerpt of your novel when you could post it chapters but you might have good reasoning for doing that. The only reason I really bring it up is because it's hard to organize and hard for the reading to jump into the story, so that's a small note.

From the plot I had a hard time telling what was going on in the story. From what I've gathered James killed people to save Max and Richard, whom I don't know who are, and Josephine is being forced or is going to kill him. I didn't find the plot that interesting and I think that's one of the things needing work. This is because it's vague and the reader doesn't really have too many context clues as to what's going on. Something that I think that was the strength of the piece was the dialogue and I think that you can use that to your advantage to make good character interaction.

The other thing that needed strengthening was the imagery and description. The characters and plot and structure are all something that make up your skeleton and the description or imagery is the flesh of the story, and you don't really have that here. Create the atmosphere around the characters, give us something to envision. Leaving a part of it up to the reader's imagination is fine, but when there's no imagery, there's no guide. I suggest looking into sensory details here because it would do well in this scene, how it looks, feels, sounds, /tastes/, even.

I hope I helped and have a great day!

I'll say upfront that I'm usually not too interested in books like this one. However, I will say that I still found quite intriguing. I also like how you drew me in and kept me drawn from start to finish. Questions swarmed throughout my head.
All in all, I liked it a lot. If you post more about this, then I will definitely want to read it.