Title: The Wailing Woman by ObewitchedmoonlightO
Source: Zelicaon Awards by -Chrysalis_Realm
Category: Fantasy
Mature: Y (blood, death, suicide, swearing, violence, other heavy topics)
LGBTQIAP+: N
Status: Ongoing
Special note (judging): I had 3 books from this category, and the other judges (nkvenus7878 and dead_poet_7) had 6 and 5 books, respectively.
Result: 93/100

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*****

Rubric:
- Basic introduction (cover, title, and description): 20
- First impression (first few chapters): 10
- Story mechanics (plot and characters): 30
- Grammar and vocabulary: 20
- Writing style (including pacing): 20
Total: 100

*****

Total score: 93/100

Basic introduction (cover, title, and description): 17/20
Cover: Well, this is creepy—which is what you're going for, so that's good. The purples and silvers all go together really well. Everything goes together here. It's so well-blended. The image is really intricate, with more details the more I look, and your font style, color, and placement are all great. My only suggestion would be to bump up the size of the subtitle. It's not really legible from the table of contents page, and even when I click the book on your profile to pull up a larger picture, it's still really small. I wouldn't go too big on it, though. Maybe a size or two up. But that's it. This is a creepy, fantastical cover, which works great with a creepy, fantastical story.

Title: And your title is also perfect for this story. "Wailing" has that connotation of sadness or despair, and it makes perfect sense for a banshee. So, again, creepy, fantastical, spot-on.

Description: First up, I appreciate the content warning. Everybody has their triggers or things they just don't like to read, and it's always nice to get that info right up front in the blurb. I always hate getting several chapters into a story before I come across something I can't deal with, because now I'm invested in the characters and the plot, but I can't go on. It's really frustrating.

Anyway. This is a bit long for my preference for a blurb, but I know others like long blurbs, so that's not something I dock points for. Along with the content warnings, this really gives the reader an idea of what to expect, and you tell quite a lot while leaving a lot more as a mystery that the reader can only solve by reading the book, which is good. Sometimes, people give too much away in long blurbs, but I think you have the right balance here.

There are some issues with punctuation throughout, and cleaning that up will help to polish this and really sharpen your hook. The first sentence of the first paragraph is actually two complete sentences, so the comma should be either a semicolon or a period. It's not necessary, but I think adding a hyphen in the second sentence would really amp up the punch value here, emphasizing the twist from her predicting death to saving a life: "...destined to die - and she succeeds."

In the second paragraph, no comma after "but," but you could add one after "fate."

In the third paragraph, "met" should be "meet," since this is in present tense, and a comma afterwards would be a good idea. I think changing the period to a colon and moving "a prediction" up here would work well: "...more from Nora: a prediction."

Next paragraph, "could" should be "can" to keep with the present tense. I think splitting this sentence up would improve the flow a bit. It's a little lengthy and awkward as is. I'd change the comma after "living" to a period, cut "and," and start the next sentence with "as." Then, there should be a comma after "closer" and "Nora."

And in the last paragraph, I think fleshing the short snippets out to fuller ideas would flow better from the previous paragraph. Something like: "Secrets will be exposed, a deadly romance will (fill in the blank), and, as always, there will be a death around every corner." That gives the reader a very glossed-over summary of what comes after the details you've provided, which draws them in further, making them want to investigate what those statements mean.

First impression (first few chapters): 10/10
Well, this story was immediately not what I was expecting. I don't read a lot of paranormal stuff, and I had in my head this weird image of some unearthly banshee and Death in an alternate plane going around and messing with reality, so starting the story off with a college age girl getting discharged from a psychiatric hospital was a complete shift for me. The story is definitely dark, of course, but it's angsty, not horrific. It's relatable. Nora, the college age girl who happens to be a banshee, is relatable. She immediately caught my attention and pulled me into the story.

And Death—well, you've got dark romance down. There's been nothing explicitly romantic thus far, but the way you describe him, the few times he touches her, the words he chooses to describe her—there's a distinct undertone of intrinsic, subtle sensuality. Readers who enjoy dark romance and bad (very bad) boys might be swooning already.

A note about Nora getting hit by a car, though. Um...shouldn't she have some broken bones at least? 😅

Story mechanics (plot and characters): 30/30
Well, as I said, I don't read a lot of paranormal stuff, but I'm pretty sure this is not a plot anybody else has used. Maybe a banshee has been a normal person before. Death has certainly been embodied as a person before. Making a deal with the Devil is a fairly common theme. So are voices in a person's head predicting death. But this is still unique. Nora is a banshee who has suffered the voices and predictions of death since she was a child, and she just wants it all to stop. She wants to live a normal life or to die. Those are the two options, basically. And when she defies fate by saving a life that was supposed to die, Death won't let her die in place of the soul he lost. She has to make a deal, and it's not much of a deal. Her choices aren't great. And while that deal is fulfilled by the end of chapter five, her interactions with Death are not. We all know, even without the blurb telling us otherwise, that Death will keep coming back for her. Thus sets the stage for the rest of the book.

Nora is so relatable. Anybody with mental health issues like depression will know exactly how she feels. That desperation, that longing to be free—I would wager that everybody at one point in their life or another has felt at least some of that. And Nora is not a static character, either. We don't know everything up front. You tell us as the story goes, filling in details about her mother, her childhood, her daily life, her coping mechanisms. She's as much a story as the book itself.

Then there's Death, of course. He's definitely not a 2D character. His personality is in flux, still largely a mystery, but there's certainly more to him than just a sheer unfeeling evil being. Nora caught his attention by defying fate, but she's holding it with her strong personality and continued defiance, and it's easy to see his interest taking on a more intimate nature. He already has a pet name for her, and he's made it clear she's attractive.

Your side characters are also memorable and distinct from the first time you introduce them. The psychiatrist, Nora's mother, Theo, Theo's father—some play larger roles than others, but they all get attention.

And you're doing world-building here, too, although it's much more subtle than more fantastic worlds. This reality has banshees, for a start, and they blend in with regular people. Death is an actual person. Little crumbs, little threads, all answering questions and bringing up more, which I expect you'll answer as you elaborate throughout the story.

Grammar and vocabulary: 16/20
Similar issues with the blurb here, but overall, fairly clean, and mistakes don't detract from the story to make it unreadable or anything. You could use commas more frequently, and there are places where semicolons or periods should replace the commas you have to separate two independent sentences. There's some awkward phrasing here or there, things that could be a little smoother or a little clearer, but nothing really major. The biggest overall issue I think is maintaining one tense throughout. There's some flip-flopping from past tense to present tense and back again, and it's best to pick one and stick with it for consistency. That eliminates a lot of confusion for the reader.

There was one instance I found of a word that needs to be swapped out. It's in chapter one, when you say "singed." It should be "sang." Probably just something you overlooked, so I thought I'd point it out.

When you first start using dialogue, you're spot-on with punctuation and capitalization, but that kind of gets a little lax as the story goes on, so just be careful to stick with the same rules throughout for consistency. If your dialogue is leading into a dialogue tag that can't stand on its own as an independent sentence, you should use a comma instead of a period. A dialogue tag tells who the speaker is and how they're saying something. And the start of the dialogue tag should be lowercase unless it's a name or something that's always capitalized:

"I won't let him die," she muttered.
"I won't let him die." She clenched her fists at her sides with determination.

And same thing when the dialogue tag leads into the dialogue:

She muttered to herself, "I won't let him die."
She clenched her fists at her sides in determination. "I won't let him die."

Thoughts are treated the same way as dialogue, just in italics and without the quotation marks:

I won't let him die, she thought.
I won't let him die. She clenched her fists at her sides with determination.

Writing style (including pacing): 20/20
As I've said, this is very readable and engaging. Your descriptions are great, your characters are fully fleshed out, the story is unfolding at an appropriate pace—fast enough to hold attention, but slow enough so the reader doesn't feel overwhelmed by everything all at once. Honestly, I wasn't sure what to expect from this story, and it's definitely darker than what I usually read, but I've enjoyed it. There's a really strong pull to keep reading right from the start, and that only increases as the story goes on.