The Wings of Storm By draphy

1- The Book with Glistening Eyes (Chapter Title)
Fantasy / Kids (Genre)
Escape (Themes)
First Person Past (consistent)
Suspense level (🌝🌚🌚🌚🌚)

---------------- 11.23.2020 -----------

Hello

Thank you for letting me read your first chapter. Things to look for in a first chapter.

- clear genre (Fantasy / Kids)
- clear time period (Unknown, Alternate Universe)
- clear MC (Tahro)
- few characters introduced (quite a few: Youka, Tahro, mother, Kaede, Aiho, Daisuke, Tsubasa, Katsu)
- tension / suspense (low)
- a life-changing event / decision (Unsure)

Firstly, I must commend you on a well-edited chapter. Any more polish and it'd be as shiny as those eyes on the manga cover. No grammar pitfalls, one typo (that I recall) and good punctuation.

What's also amazing is that you have about 57 chapters. That's like taking fifty-seven rough blocks of wood and sanding each and every one of them down to make sure they are perfectly punctuated.

Thank you for a smooth read.

So let's get into your chapter. I've been giving this disclaimer for some time now and I guess it won't get any better. What I'm about to say is my opinion and you should get several before you take mine to heart. If others don't have this same issue then it could be a 'me' problem.

Here goes.

The story is not clear.

It's a letter, telling a story, about ANOTHER story.

I think you can have two of the 3 and they work well, but not all 3 in tandem.

The first concern is the names. There are so many characters. And even I, a fellow gaijin, can't keep track of them all.

Tahro
Youka
Mum
Kaede
Aiho
Katsu
Tsubasa
Diasuke

And then the names of the place of their quest. Eight people, seven names, in one chapter.

While a manga has visual aids to help us track each person, bare text has a lot more work to do.

The details and care that went into this chapter is amazing. Even when something might not have been immediately clear to me as a non-manga reader, the rest was very meticulous and it wasn't hard to fall back into the world again. Visualizing Tahro's room was easy. The manga world gave me trouble but that can wait.

Yet another issue presents itself halfway through.

We don't know what the book is about.

This reads like an anime pilot. Now, I can appreciate that because as I read this, I did imagine an anime episode. Not all forms of media are interchangeable, however. That is why some things in a book cannot translate well into a movie and vice versa.

We cannot read an anime, we must watch it. So, too, is it nearly impossible to read a manga like this and indirectly at that. The meaningful details that you give might allow a manga fan to follow it well, but a non-fan, like myself, can't.

Tahro's world comes to a standstill as he reads, and so does he. His abuse is depicted skillfully and I found myself fearing for him—greatly, but he himself is a dormant character. This reminded me of sitting down in a friend's living room watching stills from their vacation. On the screen, something's happened, but it's not really moving and everything is filtered through Tahro and given to the reader. It's not one, not two, but THREE layers. This ends up feeling like a second start. Since we don't follow Tahro INTO this world where he participates in the goings on, it's hard to become emotionally invested in the book world, the characters there, or their task. In fact, Tahro has more fun than I did.

It's like instead of eating ice cream, I WATCH someone else TALK about eating ice cream to somebody else.

Aiho and Kaede did shuffle around waiting for their quest but this second-hand story carries on without the benefit of Tahro being there himself. It brings an unease with it.

So while the grammar and punctuation are fantastic, We leave chapter 1 without the story starting. We don't know the genre right away. We don't have any hints as to what's to come. And we don't know what the crisis is or the consequences if the problem isn't solved.

If you found this critique useful at all, please consider giving it a shout out. Also, please check out the FIRST DATES chapter in this book. Help the first dates out there. For help formatting and editing, check out the TUTORIAL pages and FREE RESOURCES for more information.