Username: Fayesther

Book title: While her lips are still red.

Genre: Short story/ fantasy

No. Of chapters reviewed: 12 (including prologue and epilogue)

Focus: Everything.

BOOK COVER:

I absolutely love the image you have chosen. I think it's a perfect fit to the story. Even the expression on the face fit so well. My only concern is the title font and colour. The red merges a bit with the dress and I feel the font choice could be a little better. Since the image has so much detail, maybe you could try a simpler font to balance it out instead of something fancy? Just a suggestion :)

The title is just perfect, poetic and very fitting. It caught my attention right away, and once I knew the significance, it took on even more meaning and I loved it!

BLURB:

I think the blurb really works. I love poetry and I love the warning placed at the beginning. It's such a unique structure, something I can't say I have seen before and it suits your story so well.

My only suggestion is to replace the word 'bandit' with something else. Because, having read the story, I can't really associate it with Rosie or what she does.

May I suggest 'femme fatale' or something along those line? Or succubus if you wanna get more poetic and mystique. You do describe her as 'A creature of the night who strives off the temptation of young men' in the prologue, so the word succubus comes to mind. 

STORY ARC:

I have substituted my usual sub-heading of plot with story arc, because I felt that was more appropriate, with this being a short story.

I think the arc was beautifully executed. Starting with the past, we see what led to her possession of the lipstick and then we see her meet Henry and fall in love. And lastly we see her slow descent into darkness clinging on to the last vestiges of youth. The end was the cherry on top that wrapped it all off perfectly. 

Beautifully executed three act structure. Your writing shows so much maturity just from the way you have gone about structuring this (which I my opinion, is harder to get right for short stories than novels)

It was paced just right, and the fact that you took your time to establish plot points and not rush through them was just top notch. 

Overall, I think the story arc doesn't need any improvements at all, it's perfect the way it is. I thoroughly enjoyed the pace, the narration and the structure. 

WRITING STYLE: (CREATIVE)

Descriptions:

What can I say? I'm a fan of your descriptions. They really do have a poetic quality to them, probably because you are a poet too. But it was so amazing to read. You pulled me into each and every scene and the description of Rosie - oof. The way it changed as the story progressed was beautiful. I could clearly picture every time, the youth disappeared and the real age started cracking through the surface. 

Dialogue/ voice and tone:

I have sort of combined the two because I feel they both influence each other. 

I love your dialogues, but I feel like the voice of the characters could be differentiated a bit more. Especially Rosie's and Henry's. Rosie, being the MC has a very clear voice and tone, both in the narration as well as dialogues but I found it a bit hard to distinguish between her voice and Henry's. 

And one more thing was, I found a little bit of inconsistencies with Rosie's dialogue.

I'll give an example down below:

In chapter 5, when Rosie is asking Henry about how he knows the old crone she says, "No wait, hang on. You bring up something like that and expect me to ignore it? Explain yourself!"

Why this tripped me up is because, from what I have noticed, you use Rosie's word to showcase her advanced years. Even though she looks young, she still speaks really maturely and doesn't use much informal words. I thought that was really clever. And it does work in most places. But like the example I gave it's a little inconsistent.

Hang on isn't a formal word it's a pretty new term so I wouldn't expect Rosie to use it. What does cinch her age is when she says 'explain yourself' because that's something people don't really say nowadays. It gives us little peeks into how old she actually is. 

My suggestion:

So I feel if you were to sort of remove the more modern and informal terms from her dialogue, it would make it a lot more smoother. 

And as for differentiation of voice, maybe you could give Henry consistent body languages or catch phrases or something of that kind. Or you could make his dialogues a lot more informal than Rosie's since he is significantly younger than her. By contrast her dialogues would seem a lot more old world, and it would work well I think.

Flow:

Your writing flows absolutely beautifully. The way you transition from one scene to the next as well as one thought process to the next is just perfect. I did not feel anything was out of place or out of order. Beautiful!

Prose:

I have one suggestion for change in chapter 4. Instead of 'his heart skipped a beat,' maybe you could say 'his heart stuttered.' This is because the guy is really scared, but skipped a beat would imply something more positive. So I feel stuttered might be the way to go.

Apart from this, I felt some of the areas were a bit of telling rather than showing. 

I'll give some examples down below.

Chapter 7 - 'A distant evil power takes over her mind.'

It's clear from the previous sentences as well as what follows that something evil is happening to her. You have beautifully shown us that. So I feel spelling it out might not be required.

Chapter 8 - 'Something terrible was going on and the darkness was stopping her from figuring out what that was'

Again, I feel from what is happening in the scene, we readers can gather that something terrible was indeed happening and that Rosie can't figure it out, so this reiteration isn't really required.

My suggestion:

As you probably know, a prose that feels heavy on telling, usually happens because of imbalance between narration descriptions and dialogue. 

When I come across this problem in books, I usually ask the author to add more descriptions and dialogues to cut down on the narration.

But with yours both descriptions and dialogues give us more than enough information that I won't ask you to add more.

However, what I do suggest is cutting down the parts of narration that is just repeating/reinforcing/reiterating what has already been shown through descriptions and dialogues.

I hope this helps :)

WRITING STYLE: (TECHNICAL)

As you already know, your technicalities are extremely strong. There is no need for me to talk about it. You are clearly very experienced and you guide so many others on these points, that there is nothing for me to say. Except, the strong grammar and punctuation really helped with the flow. It was so nice to read a book with proper grammar, thank you ♥️ I enjoyed it. 

CHARACTERS:

Rosie:

Rosie certainly stole the show for me. The way you describe her is out of this world. I absolutely loved the fact that you made her grey instead of portraying her as someone flawless. So I really enjoyed her whole character arc and the fact that it reached such a satisfying conclusion. The ending really tugged at my heart.

Henry:

He was written really well too. His purpose in the story was to act as a guiding force and he did that beautifully. Even though Rosie's characterization was so overpowering, he quietly and subtly, held his own. Beautiful!

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I'm so flattered that you asked me to review the book, seeing how you were one of my initial reviewers when I re-wrote Dear Tressi. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and the story is extremely impactful and just plain poetic. I'm a fan of your writing style and thank you for choosing me to review the work. I hope this review helped and I wish all the very best on your writing journey!