Hey Kanyon, Tuck swinging by with a review to finish off this review day. I don't believe I've ever reviewed for you before (although I may or may not have sneak-read portions in pads before), so I'm excited to give you some official feedback on this project!
Right off the bat, you used a really compelling narrative voice that really captured the story well. I'm a little envious of your ability to get the amount of details so spot-on. There's definitely an element of poetry to your writing that makes it really beautiful and artistic, which kept my interest throughout. You really do have a gift for both poetry and prose and I hope you continue developing it!
The scene with the therapist was well-written and included details that made it feel legitimate. I liked the way that the emphasis on note-taking impacted Rhys and the way he responded to that; his fidgets and the small glimpses of his thoughts tease the reader with just a little bit of an idea of what he's thinking about. One area I think you could improve in that section is the way that you included Kentucky summer sunrise. It felt strange that this was something he could immediately state as something that characterized him, but later struggled to explain why it fit him. I understand the importance of tying in the title, but maybe you could have slipped it in a little bit at a time to kind of model the process of figuring it out. Maybe in this chapter he calls himself a "sunrise", and then later determines me is more of a summer sunrise, and so forth. That gives the idea more time to progress and therefore would be more impactful than just throwing it into the story so early on.
Moving on to the next scene, I like the way that you showed his compulsions through example. You continued the trend of portraying his mental health with deep acuity without spelling it out for the reader, and even though it was short, it captured an important moment that gives the reader more of a glimpse into his personality. It's clear that Rhys is a very fleshed-out, deep, and emotional main character, and I'm finding that I like him already and want to continue following his journey. One potential area of improvement that I see is the amount of synonyms. You used a different cadence of prose here, and while it was effective for the most part, I think you should limit the long-winded list of synonyms to one spot. I identified two areas where I felt that you intentionally echoed similar ideas in different phrasing --
he gathered his dirty laundry, cleaned the trash of his bedroom floor, cleared his desk of the old crumpled papers; took the hoard of dirty dishes to the kitchen; stacked his books into piles, and when he was dissatisfied with that, put them away in the crates under his bed. He went to the kitchen again, where he scrubbed the stains off the table; cleaned out the fridge; did the dishes; he dusted the living room, cleaned his bong, took his laundry downstairs and started the wash. When he was done with it all, two hours’ worth, he sat at his desk chair and rewarded himself with a smoke session, feeling marginally better, but still wrong; like a car that always pulled slightly to the left, or moldy yogurt, or glasses that were dirty, smudged with fingerprints and slight hints of grease.
it was so physical he could stop thinking for a while, focus purely on the sensations, lose himself in them until everything in his brain ceased to exist, and until all it became was a chase, a never-ending one at that, and ay, there’s the rub; he liked when things were so extreme he could feel them, the feeling of ecstasy, the feeling of mania, the feeling of good, the feeling of anything, the incessant, penetrating, constant want and need to feel something.
These are both placed very close to each other and are stretching grammatical conventions -- which is totally okay, but I think that putting these two thoughts so close together leads to the second one losing some of its effect. At that point, you're toeing the line of moving from poetic, long-winded sentiments to rambling thoughts. I'll leave the solution for that to you, and it's up to you if you want to change anything and how you want to adjust it, as you know your goal with those two sections better than I ever could.
Anyway, I'll leave you with that for now. I hope some of my notes and impressions were helpful to you and I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have. Best of luck with this, and please, keep writing!
~Tuck
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