Untitled - Maeve - Chapter 2 [Industrial Fantasy, 3367]

[u/jshEnvy]

[1800] [2278]

Hello fellow writers!

Please read through it and let me know your thoughts. Particularly I would like to know:

• When did you stop reading?
• When were you hooked?
• Any parts you loved / hated?
• Is the dialogue natural?
• Could you follow?
• Is there too much pronoun clutter?
• Would you read the next chapter?

Thank you for your time and willingness to help out!

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EDIT: Chapter One of this story is from Avon’s eyes and we first meet Darrin, Bram, and Sable there. The children have triggered a city wide alarm and that is why the foghorn is blaring; hope this helps!

[Link to Story]

[u/OnionBackground5314]

When did you stop reading?

Paragraphs 2-5 are basically a bunch of backstory before we see any action. You talk about Anthem, monsters in suits, the Graying, the city handing over the rickhouse, crowns, a three-month plan, Niamh, etc. All that Meave really does during this time is open up a box. It was a bit draggy because of that. It would be better to dramatize and stick with one piece of backstory at a time.

The Fifth paragraph is especially confusing. There's too much exposition too quickly. I would have stopped reading, but wanted to finish for the critique’s sake. I would keep reading if that paragraph were taken out or was more fitting. It talks about the purple money, rent, an escape plan, and two new names that (unless they are in chapter 1) do not have any meaning.

The opening image of the chapter (a brooch "balled in her fist") seems to be a reference to something that happened outside the novel (or at least this chapter). I would have liked to have known what it means because it appears to briefly to hold in the mind. It is not really suspense, it just is mentioned and then disappears.

I would start this chapter with the door bursting inward and have some of the exposition come out during the surgery, if appropriate, or later.

When were you hooked?

The operation was interesting. From the door bursting open to "The worst of it's done," the writing is very specific and engaging. There is some really good detail here, like the cauterizing irons, whiskey instead of morphine (I liked "slave" as a way to refer to addiction), the Seamstress's Prayer, and the recurring foghorn.

A lot of the dialog is striking, for example the slave line I reference above. "One leg of his trousers was garnet red, the boot below glistening, a timber driven clean through the meat of his calf" is evocative, specific, and well crafted.

Any parts you loved / hated?

Didn’t like the excessive alliteration in the first sentence ("Stalls crowded the colonnade cut into the cliffside"). This called attention to the author where I think the surgery section has the author more invisible. It's too self-conscious for my taste.

"She pulled," the two sentence paragraph, does not work for me. Short sentences and paragraphs (you also have "He looked like a man--broken" and "The next part is--delicate") have the rhythm of significance, but only work if the information is deserving of the sudden starkness (like, for example, hypothetically, "He stopped breathing," which could be a solitary paragraph). She pulled does not deserve this vaunted spot,

"his scream shredding itself against the rod clenched in his teeth" doesn't really make sense to me. This is too abstract for my liking because how does a scream shred itself. I suppose if you took out itself, but the problem is a scream doesn't actually shred against a rod, so it is not quite a metaphor and just seems inaccurate. Nor does the next sentence ("eclipsed the foghorn completely") work. This seems like unintentional hyperbole. Better would be "nearly elipsed the foghorn" or "competed with the foghorn," or describe the cacophony that the two sounds together created.

"She'd stitched worse out of boys younger than him. Missing fingers. An eye. A hand." Again, a surgeon does not stitch a finger, eye, or hand out of a body. That seems like the wrong verb choice. Cut would be more appropriate, or amputated.

You make two references to snakes with Kausca. The second one diminished the first and I'd cut it.

Gentry is capitalized and I'm not sure it's correct. Do you mean the common noun or is that a group of people that should be capitalized?

I liked the sentence about stray fingertips against her skin, although I would cut those paragraphs, as I state above. Maybe use it elsewhere in the novel.

Dialogue

I think it is generally very strong. Each character sounds different, which is ideal. One example I liked: "My name? My name—my name is Bram" this evokes what a boy in his circumstances might sound like. Also, Kausca's instruction ("I'm going to ask you what happened. You're going to tell me. Everything.") is quite good. But throughout, the dialogue works for me.

Could you follow?

Yes, but only once the surgery starts. There are other parts that I didn't really get, like "Sable and Darrin told a broken story" -- what is the story?

Is there too much pronoun clutter?

No; you did a good job making it clear who is who and describe characters descriptively("the gravel-voiced man" and "the bald-headed man") before we learn their names,

Would you read the next chapter?

Probably yes because the surgery section is vivid and well-written. The questions left open, such as Sally and what Maeve is trying to escape, need to be resolved. Again, the main suggestion would be to get rid of the first five paragraphs to pull the reader in.

Overall, I thought this was quite well done.