The Sonic Queen (Prologue - Chapter 4) by Wick3dClaws

Reviewed by ESHurricane

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Overview

The Sonic Queen is a novel about four girls that get kidnapped as young teenagers, given powers, and are forced to become assassins. The story starts three years later when they're on a particular mission in Hawaii to expose a high profile gang while going undercover as teens at a local high school.

Cover/Title

The title, The Sonic Queen, is very enticing to me. It's very unique and punchy and definitely drew me in right away.

I didn't love the cover so much. On the surface, the shattered mirror seems like it could be a simple and hooking cover, but in practice here it just seems busy to me. It's also a bit blurry (I checked it on computer and phone just to be sure), and so at first it took me a while to figure out what I was seeing. It almost looked like a woman standing behind crumpled up cling wrap, then I realized that it was a broken mirror.

I like the idea, I just think that it's a little over edited with the blurriness and the vignetting in the corners. I feel that it could be a lot simpler to put the focus on the best part: the title. I'm not a graphic designer, but I know what I find eye catching as a viewer, so please take my suggestion with a grain of salt. But I feel like having something simpler, maybe a plain white or black background, with a small broken mirror, perhaps just in the center, with the title very large above it might be a bit more effective to me.

Summary/Description

The Summary is a bit wordy, and I think it might be punchier if it just started at the third paragraph. The author could put at the end that it's a spin off of When Snow Falls, but starting with 'Sienna Gazinski was just your average junior high girl' kind of really hits home what the book is about. The excerpt is cool, but I feel it takes away from the concise summary below.

As an aside, I checked out When Snow Falls and I noticed that this isn't exactly a spinoff as it is a retelling from a different character's perspective. I wonder if maybe it should say that in the synopsis chapter? That it's a retelling of When Snow Falls from Sienna's point of view, but still works as a standalone novel?

Hook

I love the opening line! It's powerful, it's relevant, and it's fun, which is a nice lead in because the Prologue is pretty dark stuff.

Grammar/Structure

Overall the grammar is great, just a few commas missing here or there that I pointed out inline. Spelling is impeccable! Kudos for that! There are a few instances of word rep that I would watch for (I specifically remember a paragraph with lots of 'look' and 'school').

Structurally I have a few suggestions, the first one is that I found the chapters to be very long. There are often section breaks in the chapters and I feel as though those could easily be chapter breaks instead for a bit better flow. In a paper novel they'd be a fine length but I find on Wattpad smaller chapters seem to read a bit better. Of course this is based on personal preference and anecdotes from fellow Wattpad readers, so take that with a grain of salt!

There were quite a few instances where I wasn't sure who was speaking, because the dialogue was tagged a bit oddly. For instance, Via would have an action, and then another character would speak in the same line. Or it would be her turn to be speaking but then directly after her dialogue there would be another character's action. I'd suggest trying to keep the dialogue attached to actions of the character speaking to make it less confusing as to who is speaking.

Characters

I had a hard time resonating with some of the characters here, as I found they didn't seem to have clear voices. I thought Luna was the most interesting, as she seems the most unique. I was intrigued by her PTSD from the events of the prologue, and would be interested to read more about that and how it's shaped her personality now.

In fact, I would love to read a lot more about how the events of the prologue has shaped all of the characters. It's an incredibly intense situation, being taken from their families and tortured with experiments, forced to work for an underground agency as assassins against their will. And given superpowers! There's so much backstory there that I feel isn't explored enough, but more on that later.

In the prologue, there's a brief synopsis of each character, but it didn't really stick with me because the girls all kind of read the same. Save for Luna, like I said, but I think that's more because she drives a lot of the plot. After having checked out When Snow Falls, I realize that's because she's the main character of that book, thus drives most of the plot that this book is derived from.

In any case, I think the characters could be developed further. Really delve into what makes them unique. Take those descriptions from the prologue and build a character sheet for each girl, and give her unique traits like certain sentence structure, or tone. Give them some kind of physical tick that they do, like one of them is always playing with her hair. It seems like these are small things, but they really help set apart characters, especially when there is a main cast that are all the same gender and age.

I do really enjoy their powers, though! Nykki being able to speed read and do her homework really fast because of her superspeed is insanely creative!

Narrative

I absolutely adore the chatty style of the narrative. First person POV in present tense gives a very urgent feel to a narrative, but it allows for some really fun narrative voice because it's almost like the character is thinking the story in real time. The author has definitely done a great job taking advantage of this, and the narrative reads like I'm inside a teenaged girl's head consistently. One line that sticks out in my head is when her alarm clock goes off in the morning she describes it as being woken by 'the alarm of death' and that made me literally snort.

There are a few little skews of tense here and there where it slips into past tense, which can be a hard thing to keep track of. There are also a few POV skews, where the narrative describes the feeling of a character that isn't Via, and unfortunately that doesn't work in first person. Because I'm reading the story from her perspective, she wouldn't be able to be certain what's going on in somebody else's head. I pointed out some inline, and my suggestion stands of trying to make sure that it's through her eyes, such as He seemed to be thinking about as opposed to He was thinking about.

There are some excellent descriptions throughout, one that resonated with me was 'shining like sparkling dust', some great imagery there.

There was a fair bit of passive voice peppered throughout the story, and it's an easy trap to fall into in first person POV. Because we're writing through a character, it's tempting to start sentences with 'I feel', 'I see', 'I hear', et cetera. This is unnecessary because I'm reading the story from Via's perspective, which means whatever she describes I know she's seeing. So strengthening up those sentences will strengthen the narrative a ton. For example, instead of 'I feel fear begin to rise', it could read 'Fear begins to rise'.

Plot/Pacing

Full disclosure, I took a look at When Snow Falls and found that this book isn't exactly a spinoff as it is a direct retelling of that book from a different character's point of view. I didn't read a ton of it, but enough to know that the main plotline is the same, though it's not told in exactly the same order at the beginning. I'm going to try to only critique plot points that are unique to this book and not its predecessor, but because I haven't read the source material fully I apologize if it blends over.

I need to be blunt here, I found the switch from dark and brooding opening with government experiments and preteens to teenagers attending high school in Hawaii very jarring. It wasn't entirely unpleasant, but I often found myself wishing for more of the backstory. The flashback sequence in the prologue seemed a bit out of place as well, and I'm wondering if maybe the whole prologue would read better if it was more focused on Sienna's experience?

The scene of her in the chamber that first time, the pain she experienced, the screaming in her ears, it was so intense and well written, and I feel like that could be an extremely strong opener. The other girls can be introduced later, and their personalities can emerge more organically through the plot, but I feel as though where the prologue really shone was the bits where Sienna was alone.

I also feel like telling me what their powers are was a bit anticlimactic. The action scenes are so fun and well choreographed that I feel as though revealing their powers through a fight scene would be more intense and surprising.

I have to say though, the scene where they're flooding the entire apartment to try to kill a spider really hit home for me. I hate spiders and this would so be me! Then they froze it all and skated around the living room having fun! Little fun scenes like that are great as comic relief.

Closing Comments

All in all, it's an interesting concept, though I feel like it might be wasted on the 'undercover high school' storyline. I found the most interesting bits of the story to be when the girls were first kidnapped, and the scenes where they were out on missions. I felt like their personalities shone through better out in the world, as opposed to just hanging out at school worrying about homework and boys. I get that they're still seventeen, but if they were tortured into badass assassins, and their previous identities are really so different from who they are now, that it gives a lot more freedom to explore deeper into their new personas.

That being said, I think the author wrote it very well, and I like the idea of two authors writing the same story from different character's perspectives. It is a fun project to do together and you can tell that they both had a blast with their own work and experiencing each other's. That passion for storytelling really shows through, and I think this story has the potential to be great with some tweaking.

Keep up the excellent work and definitely keep writing!