Published August 8, 2008
Deleted. Feel free to PM me if you're a former reader wondering why/where it is now. If the mods would rather delete this entirely, feel free. The reviews are sort of nice to look back on now and then as pick me ups though.
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141,343 Literary Works • 674,360 Reviews
Pattycakes!
Ah-huh, who's finally caught up on Khalilzad? In retrospect, I should have completely ignored the flu and summer school (one and the same actually) and spent time reading this. There's at least one out-loud laugh per chapter, and your writing just gets smoother and smoother in each chapter. It's great to see improvement, especially in someone who was already good to begin with. ^_^
The one thing that I loved about this chapter was the Chinese kid telling Andrew off about how snarky he was. This is perfect--most people with idiosyncratic (read: borderline rude) teenage narrators forget to have a reality check, and after awhile it isn't funny anymore. Andrew might still make me roll my eyes, but we know that it's not just us. The people in his world think he's kind of a tool, too.
After mass-quantities of chapters, the one thing I can comment on is your style. Throughout, it's very funny, but you're more hell-bent on making jokes than writing descriptions that are grounded in the real world. It's hard to do things in a balanced manner with a first-person narrator, but it's important to also have a few lines that aren't jokes in order to create atmosphere. Even when you've got someone's thoughts to entertain you throughout the whole book, it's important that we know what's outside of those thoughts. That's what will make it less like the personal narrative that you were forced to write in school and more like a well-rounded story. Make it Andrew, though--how does he react to his surroundings? Do the adjectives he uses tell us anything about his personality? And the details he chooses to emphasize? Give us the full picture--not just a snapshot.
Agh! Post more. Now.