Lizzie: From my understanding, this story is about a mother-daughter duo in the midst of some supernatural emergency. It seemed that Janine was experiencing a transformation while her mother, Margot, was tending to her. The first thing that I liked about this story was how it opened in the middle of the scene. It caught my eye as a reader and got me interested without much background knowledge or scene setting. You did a tremendous job after the opening hook in providing the audience with more details of who, where, why, and when this situation was happening. The balance of description with dialogue was solid and didn’t feel to heavy on either side. One nit-picky detail I had about the dialogue was the use of exclamation points. Already knowing that the scene was full of emotion and conflict, the punctuation took me out a little because I anticipated the language to be rushed/in a loud tone. Moving on, the main questions I had while reading was what exactly was wrong with Janine and why are the men attacking their home/who are they. I know these may be too big of questions to answer in a 10-12 page story, but I was curious to know more about them after reading. Possibly shifting some dialogue around to answer those questions could be the solution. Overall, this story had me engaged from beginning to end!
Sophie: After reading, this story follows a girl named Alice during her experience abroad in Morocco. It did seem that there was some location pivoting in the story where Alice and her two friends went to Paris for a weekend. I thought the use of description was extremely vivid and allowed the reader to picture where Alice was. Certain uses of metaphors and similes really sold that. It never felt like it was too much or too little in comparison with the dialogue. I believe the formatting of short descriptors blended with dialogue made it that way. Overall, I liked the concept that the author was going with. There were a few moments that I had to go back and re-read purely to understand where the narrator was physically and what was happening. I think this was due to the pacing and pivoting between ideas. Going from airport to Morocco to Paris and back to Morocco all while having major events happen in each was a lot to take in. My main suggestion with that is to allow there to be a little more set-up when you’re transitioning between them. Or, narrow the focus a little more to only one or two major events, which I believe would still send the message you’re trying to make at the end. This is all to say I was very interested in your story and curious to learn more in workshop!
