A
CRITIQUE TO DIE FOR
This critique for my book, “The Tail on my Mother’s Kite,” came as one
of those wonderful surprises you can
only hope for as you’re writing the book.
Here are the words from the judge for
the 27th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards.
It’s long. My penance is, I’ve got to type it all—or
leave out some wonderful stuff. Well,
here goes:
“Lovely sense of setting at the start,
with the narrative leading us right up to the aforementioned fire that the
author used so successfully as a grab for the reader’s connection. Very well
done. We can see that the author knows
her way around descriptions, and as such, we’re present in the scene and eager
for all of the action to come. Very well done.
“Beautiful phrasing and sense of
movement throughout. “stood there alone, poking at the sky,” stands out for its
imagery and we also get a sense of movement in her actions. This is where the
author flexes mighty narrative muscles, going beyond simple physical description
to what makes an action or observation come alive: multi-layered details in the
sensory realm. Excellent choices here.
“The author spent time on every sentence,
crafting without the effort showing. “I wanted to peel off my skin to get
cooler” is another of the sensory details that grabs the reader. My heart
dropped at, “I need a father.” We’re
getting very deep into emotions. Pace is stellar, with no bumps on the path,
engaging transitions between chapters, dialogue is fully fleshed-out, with
differentiated voices for each of the characters, and I loved that the author
cared about sentence structure in each character’s voice. Impressive.
“’The harm that came to him was mostly
because our mother stopped being a mother” stands out as a dramatic wallop at
the end of a chapter, one of the finest cliffhanger insights I’ve seen in this
competition. The stomach sinks when the truth is put out so plainly, and
brutally. All through the middle third
of the book, we’re immersed in dysfunctional scenes, and now we see that the
flame has turned up gradually, so that we might not even have noticed, but the
laser-focused truth in the author’s voice shows that she has been changed by
the progression getting this far along.
Subtle tone intensity has led us expertly here, and we’re at the point
where we are changed as well. “Even our
mother was not able, ultimately, to ruin a basically sound son.” Nice! A statement of strength, realization, and a Glass
Castles-like overcoming story. Very well
done.
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