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http://www.bookcountry.com/Community/Discussion/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=8589937825

HERE'S HOW IT WORKS:

1) Every two weeks all members will read and comment on the current YA book-of-the-fortnight. The comments are to be posted both on this site and on that author’s book domain. 

2) Reviews are to be constructive, honest and positive and relate to the book, not its author. 

3) A minimum of three chapters (or first 10,000 words) would be good, but feel free to read as much as you like. Comment in one go, or over several posts. Best guide: Give the sort of review you you would like to receive. 

4) When it’s your turn as the YA book-of-the-fortnight you’ll be asked to give a few details about yourself to help us get to know you better - and an idea of what you specifically would like to get out of your reviews - eg: opinions on plot; dialogue; punctuation, characterisation, or just whether people like it and want to read on. Whatever you need. 

5) You don't have to post a review every single review period, but you might have to wait a little longer before your book comes up for review. Every two weeks I tally up participation, so you can see where you are in the queue. This is calculated as follows: number of reviews given less number of reviews received. 

SO: If you'd like to join us: 

1) You must have a book labelled YA, (or you may just enjoy the genre and review without a book.). 
2) Be committed to helpful reviews all the way through - even after you've had your review! We all really value constructive comment. 

Simply leave a post on this thread letting me know you’d like to join. Give your name, the name of your book and the link and you’ll be added to the list. Then dive in to review the current book. 

--edited by AP George on 11/13/2015, 7:20 AM--

I'm here. Just need to find time to work the upload process. It took forever the first time I tried and I gave up...

But I'm here...

(And I still think it would be cool to copy everything over and make sure nothing gets lost. Still willing to help if so...)

--edited by lilmerlin on 8/27/2015, 11:34 AM--

Let's check with AP - she's the YALF Boss

 (I'll check with her on Autho as we can't see when one is online here)

--edited by AP George on 8/27/2015, 1:40 PM--

Hi, 

I too love the idea of this thread and waiting to find out what is the next move. 

A YALF, YARG (and whatever else I owe you, Heidi ) review of Drowning in Rivers.

I’ll try and post this on both Autho and BC, to maintain some continuity.

I’m not going to look at my previous review of this (was that under the FCCG? I can’t remember) because I’d prefer to come to it fresh. You can then compare reviews and spend an entertaining hour pointing out where I contradict myself

WARNING: Contains spoilers. If you haven’t read Heidi’s book yet, do yourself a favour and read it, before you read this.

*******************************************

Prologue. I don’t get it. It tells us nothing. She might have all sorts of conflicted views about who she is and why she’s like that and be unable to articulate any of them because to do so would unleash a holocaust of tears which she might never ever ever be able to stop crying. Or she might just be a bit of a slacker and can’t be arsed.

Chapter 1
“bunkmate” - ? my eyebrows metaphorically rise. I don’t remember that twist.  You really mean bunkmate and not room or cell mate?

“Two-tone” – unnecessary because immediately after you say “chocolate and blonde”, and more specific is better.

“That’s pretty much the only good thing about getting out. I mean, five hundred hours? I did the math, that’s basically a part-time job with no pay for a whole year. Couldn’t they just let me stay here another month or something?” – I know, from reading this before, that she’s been sentenced to do community service when she’s released, but I think you’re presuming a little much of your readers to infer that from these lines.

“I bound up to the mirror” – how big is her cell? Bound implies run, to me, or at least fast movement for more than a couple of steps.

I have no idea how long highlights take to grow out. Is it six months?

“Fa’ life” – “fo’ life” ? I don’t know, just looks more consistent with earlier speech pattern.

“heterosexual life partner” – I remember that from before – still none the wiser what it means

“to my newest bestie.” – newest doesn’t ring true to me. Newest implies that she’s only become her best friend in the last few days or something, and as opposed to whom, her previous bestie that she had last week? They’ve been incarcerated together for at least six months and all the dialogue before is how close they are.
But a great way to finish the first chapter.

Chapter 2
“While he tells me in (too much) detail about Great Grandpa Willis’ recent colostomy,” – “she” not “he” and would she really be talking about colostomies – that sounds a little trite – a bit slapstick?

“becomes visible. Right” Colon I think there, not full stop, and therefore lower case “r” on River.

“I release my held breath” – she can’t release non-held breath. I know what you mean, but I’d work out a different way of putting it.

“During the sixth grade field trip that would have allowed me to do that, I’d had the flu” – Bit clumsy. “When my sixth grade class went, I had the flu”

“it’s essentially just a ginormous metal arch but there is something so magnificent about it,” – she comes across as a bit inarticulate, and you’ve already said all this two paras ago.

“I turn to Mom, shocked by her affronted tone” – sounds a bit awkward. “I turn to Mom. She sounded pissed” sounds more in character.

I don’t like the “I asked you ‘why’…” dialogue here. Its seems false and inserted against the run of the chapter and also enunciated too clearly “Why exactly did you push Nate’s truck into the lake?”, like her Mom’s wearing a wire for the FBI and wants to get her daughter’s confession on tape. Surely if she was going to ask that question, at this precise moment when Grace has just got into her bedroom having not seen it for half a year (which I find hard to believe however confrontational her Mom is), she’d say something like “Why did you do it?”. They both know what Grace did. Why is she spelling it out? If you have to get the details across to us right now (I’d argue that you don’t), you need to do it differently.

“kids,” she” – think a full stop here rather than comma.

“with my very own blue eyes shining back” – nice touch

“Don’t EVEN call me again” – think you’ve emphasised the wrong word here. If it’s “don’t EVER call me again”, it’s okay, but if “even” surely it should be “don’t even CALL me again”?

“which is perfect because South St Louis has a wide selection of restaurants” – are you writing a tour guide?

Chapter 3
“you need to understand the full extent of what you did” – surely she would have been told? Don’t they have a victim’s impact statement, or is that just in the event of a fatality? Even if not, I just think there would have been a fairly long time between the incident and Grace’s sentencing, at least a few months, and in that time it would have become clear what the impact on Andrea really was and Grace would have been told, or seen in the media.

“My mouth flops open with a loud exhale as he metaphorically punches me in the gut.” – I think you could evidence her reaction better with dialogue, which then would build more organically to the “Hell no!” expostulation. A simple “What?” then he continues with “You start on Monday…” she interrupts, “What the fuck?” as her reaction gathers pace, and then he finishes “You’ll be back on August the twenty-ninth” and she explodes. I don’t really like the “metaphorical punch in the gut” line, and I also think her explosion is too well articulated to be the first thing she says after being told her fate.

Would she really think of Lox at this moment? I think she’s still, at heart, the self-centred cow who went in to juvy, and your book describes her character arc to become a more empathetic individual, no? So at this point I would have thought she would be entirely concentrating on herself.

And then in a flash she capitulates and says she deserves it. I’m not convinced of her emotional arc the way you’ve painted it, the pacing is from nothing to explosion and back to mute acceptance within a few lines. I think this is a key scene which needs a little work.

“She was so tiny.” - Most twelve year olds aren’t that tiny. Mine is as tall as his mother already. And Grace was only sixteen when it happened, so there wouldn’t actually be much of a difference in size unless Andrea is unusually small?

Chapter 4
“Which is creepy.” – just “Creepy” alone would be stronger I think.

“Feel free to decorate” – really? She’s only there three months.

I’m STAGGERED that she would go off with four blokes in a pick-up truck the first night she’s supposed to be at Andrea’s. Hasn’t she ANY guilt or shame at all? Whatever she has coming to her, she deserves it. And I’m also bemused by her parent’s reaction of just abandoning her, given that they would know she has a history of panic attacks and could be lying by the side of a road or in casualty or something.

“After talking with Bear and the girls for a bit, the girls take me around to introduce me.” – introduce me around, or just show me around.

“being put out so pull my shirt” – so I pull

I thought ambience was spelled with two e’s. Maybe it’s a US thing.

“freaking bipolar.” – new insult please

A seventeen year old girl, on a Harley she’s unfamiliar with, having been drinking any beer at all? I’m sorry, she wouldn’t have made it fifty yards. And you don’t need to prime a Harley, unless it’s a real old one, and if it was a real old one, she wouldn’t be able to steer it.

“I slide off the bike and remove the helmet. He secures it on the back of the bike” -  a little wordy. You could cut either “bike”. Is it really necessary that we know where he puts it? And surely if he’s going off home he’s going to be wearing it anyway?

OH NO HE ISN’T – Great twist!

I did that thing with memorising creaky stairs, so I know just where Bear’s coming from.

“Knowing who he is now, I’m worried he might try to make a move” – she’s a very poor judge of character, or else it’s just her crotch talking.

Right, okay, bit of a retraction in order. So now her parent’s behaviour (leaving, having watched Grace just flee the house in a panic attack) is more explainable. They got a text from Bear telling them he’d found her. I wondered why you were making such a big deal about the hot guy on his phone. When did he see her so that he knew who she was? Donna was blocking the bedroom door when he left. I suppose you’ll tell me that it was when the curtains twitched when she arrived. You see, I was paying attention ! I still don’t get Grace’s behaviour though. It’s somewhat sanctified afterwards by the fact that the Rivers family appear to blame themselves as much as Grace for Andrea’s accident (which is a bit of a stretch, to be honest). But when she arrives Grace doesn’t know that. I realise she’s not under house arrest or anything, but to just run off seems unpardonable.

That was to the end of chapter 5. Great stuff. There’s plenty to look at in my notes above, but most of them are stylistic things I think. I’d write it differently, but it’s your book of course. Unless you think I’ve got a point, you can safely ignore quite a lot of it.

One or two typos, but otherwise a great standard of writing.

Characters nicely drawn but I must admit Grace I haven’t really worked out yet.  She seems quite a nasty piece of work. She doesn’t seem to have any real repentance. Sure, she wells up a bit and goes hysterical when she realises that she’s going to be looking after Andrea all summer, but it read to me as petulance rather than distress (what I said about the emotional arc of that meeting), not deep-rooted emotion of any particular kind. In fact, she seems generally quite shallow. Her only classification of any male on the scene is either fuckable or not fuckable within seconds of making their acquaintance (I thought men were supposed to do that?) and it's actually her that's the prick-tease. The only thing she seems to have evinced any real emotion about is The Arch building at the beginning of Chapter 2. Maybe she’s just not a people person.

The plot I think is what makes this book stand out. It’s a great premise, and on this evidence you seem to have an adept grasp of twists. I was neatly taken in by Bear – never occurred to me to put two and two together, in spite of, now I look back, quite a few hints. There are layers of complexity that I feel that I can trust you to unravel , but I don’t feel that I know where, necessarily, the story is going at all <edit> in a good way. Just edited this in case you think that's a negative comment<end of edit>. I think it needs a bit of tidying and tightening up, but then you know me by now. I’ve just started another rewrite of Evenrood. There’s a “cringe” moment on almost every page, in spite of all the nice things people said about it. Does it ever end?

--edited by D'Estaing on 8/27/2015, 6:29 PM--

Yipeee!

Count me in AP - so glad to have found another familiar  face

Hello, everyone. Apologies for any confusion, but I have moved this thread into YA section of the site. You can find it here:

http://www.bookcountry.com/Community/Discussion/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=8589937825

--edited by AP George on 11/13/2015, 7:19 AM--