Young Writers Society

Hi! Spunky here to review!

The sky was falling. Literally.

Okay, not literally literally, but it felt like the sky was falling to Ruben.

If Penny Henny was hit in the head by a Pinecone, then there must have been high wind speeds.

I will not cry! I will not cry! I cannot cry!

“Oi! You there!” cried of voice.

big poof (Yes, to Ruben it was a "Big poof").

Hi Yoshikrab! Back again

So, I'll start off this review by saying that I was quite confused. At the start of last chapter, I thought that all of the airships were landing at the capital of LandCorp for some kind of grand meeting between the corporations. I didn't understand it was the capital of SkyCorp, but in my defense, it was a pretty easy detail to miss. This was really only mentioned once in a single line, and since I didn't get any description of the city, I had assumed that it was from LandCorp because those were the only kinds of cities mentioned.

I mentioned this in the last review, but it would really help to set up the scenes with enough description so that the reader is on the same page as you are. What does a city in the sky look like? How is this city able to stay up there? And if there are floating cities, then why do they need the aircrafts? I feel like this raises a lot of questions that I would have loved to be addressed by Silvan, who is kind of our tour guide to this world, since (as I also mentioned before), he's knew to it too! Allow him to explore and ask and learn so that we can do the same, but in a way that doesn't feel forced -- like him going to this Meet Day!

The other thing that I didn't quite understand was how did the Firecracker go from being on fire to it fall out of the city? This felt like another lack of description, but in my head, if there was a big floating city, then it would have a bit solid ground where the airships could land on as everyone went to the Meet Day celebrations. This doesn't seem to be the case, but there aren't any descriptions that contradicted my idea.

Now, onto the actual chapter.

What was the purpose of Ruben talking to that one guy who then immediately got exploded? I do enjoy your writing, and I think you have a good handle on the narration, but I'm wondering why you switched to Ruben's perspective immediately after the incident with the Firecracker instead of showing the aftermath up on SkyCorp? And while I see that it's a very urgent situation that Ruben will likely lose his home and his family, but why not expand on that instead of having this intermission where he's talking to a random person and not saying much of anything in return.

This chapter would be much stronger, in my opinion, if you expanded on the urgency of the situation, if you played it out more and made the story move a few steps forward. In each chapter, you want to strike a good balance between moving the plot forward enough but also not speeding through it. In this case, at the beginning of the chapter, Ruben was watching the skycraft fall. And at the end he was still watching the skycraft fall, except he got knocked out. Was an entire chapter necessary for this to happen? I'm curious what that means, but in my opinion, there wasn't enough substance in this chapter to warrant such an abrupt ending.

So I think the main points I want to reiterate are 1) description is your best friend - it can also help add substance to your chapters so the feel more full and eventful - and 2) make sure chapters advance the story in a meaningful way. I'm not saying this was a bad chapter, but it felt like filler after what seemed like such a massive event previously, and I would have liked to have seen you jump off that event and propel the story forward, show us how your characters react to adversity, etc. if that makes sense.

Hopefully this wasn't too rambly. Let me know if you have any questions!
~ Wolfe