Jabberwocky Reviews

36: Tara: Wolf Chronicles by CAMILLA1234

"Thirteen-year-old Thalia Ohinwaaa ,an art prodigy fled from her abusive father but dies and gets another chance to survive in a cold, unforgiving place. Can she survive the tribe of the mysterious and ancient creatures known as Tara? An isolated clan thriving with giant wolves. Or will she die trying? Will she ever prove t her friends that she's alive?

Fourteen-year-old Nathanial Rheas, a funny and caring guy tries to prove to everyone that Thalia isn't dead and he's certainly not crazy. Will he survive High School? His teen life and find Thalia?"

There are some trigger warnings listed in the book that I won't copy in their entirety (they're in the first chapter), but include things like death, gruesome imagery, language, and abuse. I will avoid mentioning these in the review but do note this if you read the book.

There are a few funky commas (including places where commas are missing) and other punctuation marks in this blurb, and this is a trend that continues through the book, but if I'm being honest this didn't hamper readability here as much as it has with some other books. A demerit, yes, but I'm also trying to loosen up from being the grammar police officer I was in some of the earlier reviews. So I'll just preemptively say that there's some proofreading that could be done, but most books need proofreading. That aside, I think your blurb clearly sets out two different plotlines. There's this girl who dies and wakes up somewhere else, and there's what's happening in the real world concurrently. It tells us what happens in the book and that's really what blurbs should do. Clean up the punctuation and you'll be fine here. After I read the book I had other thoughts about the blurb, but I'll address those later, as opposed to what I imagine a reader checking this out for the first time might think.

I already mentioned the punctuation thing so I won't elaborate on it more other than that your prose is generally fine, that aside, which almost makes it more vexing since I wouldn't expect the punctuation to simultaneously be so erratic. It's kind of like turning in a homework assignment that's stapled incorrectly and a bit crumpled: it's not going to change what's actually written on the page, but there are reasons why a teacher would take points off, and it's such a simple thing to fix that it should be fixed. As for the rest of the first chapter, there's definitely a certain template this follows that I've reviewed before: weird dream, then protagonist wakes up and heads to school for a normal day. There's kind of a reason why everyone does this—people read it—but I always wonder if there are other permutations of this people could try. Why not find a way to put the dream in the middle of the chapter or the end? From like a sheer clickability standpoint I don't think this is doing you a ton of favors, especially as the end of the chapter feels like it trails off without much of a natural break: "School ended after four more periods" feels abrupt, like there should be something that happens afterward, except we don't get any hint what this is because the chapter ends. For these two reasons I think you need something more in this first chapter to have this stand out, since the prevailing impression I'm left with is a sense of deja vu.

Prose-wise beyond this, there are some "common" phrases that are bugbears of mine. I don't think "crimson liquid" adds anything over saying "blood"—the word "blood" is scary enough as is, and what other liquid are we talking about, pomegranate juice?—and there are a few redundancies, for instance where we wait both "patiently" and "slowly" for the sunrise. This is a good idea with just one of those words (I'd prefer "patiently" since one doesn't really wait slowly), but doesn't work with both. Are Alex's pants plaid or checkered? Does Thalia not know? There are decisions I like: "cold, fiery eyes" is a good example of oxymoron, and the "I dressed like I hated myself. I did, actually." elicited a chuckle. But there are some other ideas that need just a bit more polish—I don't think it's necessary to say "blueberry phones" to avoid calling them Blackberry or iPhone (they won't sue you), but if you do this capitalize it unless they're phones that look like blueberries. Without pointing out every example of good or bad, since I could make similar comments about the entire book, look at your descriptions with a critical eye to see what's either directly redundant or doesn't hold up when you think about it too much. I don't think your descriptions are excessive at all, but sometimes there are moments where characters are clearly angry or sad and we can tell already, but then they need some sort of foot-stomping or something to make it crystal clear when it already is, and hence those descriptions fill up space. There's another book I reviewed that's very similar to yours I remember had a similar issue, but I don't remember which; if you manage to find what I'm talking about, they might have solved this problem and you can learn from their example.

I'm avoiding certain specific plot descriptions because of what I said earlier about content warnings, but in a broad sense I think you start out strong. Your second chapter feels like it has more of a driving narrative than the first with things happening and character development, while in the first it felt like we had the dream and then we just walked around meeting people. I think you build a good portrait of Thalia's family here and the relationships between characters. One thing I will say is that I expected wolves to come up sooner: the dream gives us a hint there's something happening, but it takes us longer to get there than I would think. That's one argument against the dream template in my opinion: it creates an obligation to cut to the chase, and whatever happens in between automatically feels like background. I think what happens in the middle is interesting, but if readers want wolves they don't get wolves.

As we get into later chapters, don't forget to watch your descriptions: someone described as "literally pushing my eyeballs out" sounds very gruesome, and I imagine what you have in mind isn't what I would describe as "literally" pushing out their eyeballs. Clothing descriptions and other physical details like that sometimes come at unnatural times, and this is always a delicate balance: you need something to act as characterization, but nobody naturally wakes up, walks around, and thinks about the color of shirt they're wearing. I can tell you right now I'm wearing a blue sweater, jeans, and pink fuzzy socks as I write this review, but you don't learn anything about me from that beyond that like most people I wear clothes: likewise, the exact colors of their clothing matter less than details like shorts being too big (and even this doesn't add a ton visually, honestly less than the colors). I mention this because you often stack a lot of descriptive details of this nature, in a way where we certainly couldn't hope to remember all of them and also where each individual one loses its meaning. I felt the some way with character introductions, especially when we switch POVs for the first time and we suddenly have to meet a bunch of new people.

It's a bit of a recurring trend that chapters end on weird lines, always a few sentences too late or too early. "I dropped the ball and watched as it stopped bouncing" and "School ended after four more periods" aren't as clean of breaks as "He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing," though this is honestly a bad example because I think Fitzgerald (this is a quote from The Great Gatsby) executes other techniques better. There's a thematic resolution in context here, while sometimes with these chapters, again, it feels like we've run out of time—and the end of every chapter is where readers decide if they want to continue or not. As I went further in I felt the frequency of those vaguely awkward descriptions I mentioned increased, and it feels more like we jump between ideas too quickly for everything to land and make an adequate impression. I don't think I'm a slow or "stupid" reader: I think that at times it really was too much too quickly, in a way where the solution is most likely to trim the number of "dramatic" descriptions or otherwise think about which ones are the most important for us to be left with. Otherwise we can't remember it all versus one out-of-nowhere "wow what just happened" moment.

The last thing I'll say is that I know this story isn't complete yet, but your blurb and first chapter tell me there are going to be different plotlines happening than what it feels like I got here. I got a good story so far, but I'm expecting wolves. If these are going to be the pivotal elements of the story when finished, it's going to take readers way too long to get there. The dream happens and then it never comes up again because we're doing other things, and if I had to pick one thing overall to criticize, it's that a lot of elements—the descriptions that are sometimes a bit circuitous or irrelevant, plot elements that come up and then fade just as quickly—feel unfocused, like there's not one complete package and throughline. If I look at the last few chapters compared to the few chapters previous and so on, it's hard to see how we got from A to B to C. A story that meanders isn't inherently a bad thing, but that's different from a meandering story that has promised us something and never arrived. I think this was largely a pleasant read: there's a bit more cleaning up in the prose that needs to be done I'd talk more about if I didn't think I'd emphasized it enough, but I enjoyed this and I think you have a really solid foundation. It just needs a bit more polish. I'm going to give you an 80/100, since while there were some technical elements lacking that might suggest a lower grade I personally enjoyed this, and I think that a clean-up here would do proportionally more here than some stories which have bigger fish to fry. If I were you and deciding where to go from here, my first step would be to clean the prose-level issues. Then I'd have another thought about what are the most important parts of this story and how I'd convey those to my readers. Just some food for thought. Great work.