Sunflower Reviews

Rowan - The Fall

Review: The Fall

Reviewer: Rowan (RowanCarver)

Client: Shivran86

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I am embarrassingly American so I am going to try and review this story the best I can without making myself sound like a fucking idiot, but to be honest, my knowledge of mythology is really small and this story made me feel super guilty about that. Might be signing up for a religion/culture course in the near future.

The plot was difficult for me to comprehend but this was my interpretation. It's not that the story is poorly written or anything, it's just sometimes I got caught up in the prose, the dialogue, and lost sight of what the story was about. Also it doesn't help that I'm not really familiar with any of the lore, which is really sad, and I predict a rabbit hole of research in the near future for me.

An immortal named Amara, who lives in our modern time and goes to school like everyone else, travels back not just to the past but to a completely different part of the cosmos. There she discovers that she's a pretty powerful goddess. A secondary plot follows Varuna as the author takes on her own interpretation of his lore, which I'm learning about in a video essay in a separate window right now. The opening scene here after the time travel chapter was really well described, I quite liked it and want to point it out.

The ocean had neither a beginning nor an end. Rainbows and moonbeams mixed together in this place of magic. Fireflies, like moulds of salts, made heaps of light as they gathered around one another. Their radiance helped the Master of Illusions, Swarbhanu, to dress the new maiden the way she was destined to look.

A quick note about exposition though, and I do this too, be careful when you name drop to do it absolutely intentionally. I like name dropping and making my readers wait until later in the story to tell them who these characters are as a foreshadowing/exposition tool...published authors do it all the time. But you have to be careful not to do it too much, sometimes when these gods were thrown at me I felt like I was expected to already know who they are. After a quick Google search I figured it out, but to a dull American audience member like me, a lot of the lore is lost and unexplained. But maybe you shouldn't have to explain it, maybe it's my fault for not knowing it, and now I feel ignorant.

A quick note about the hook:

Marks-they marked you as their own. It was sinister. But I felt like a Messiah, taking the trouble fallen over the poor upon my own fate.

There's a lot of meaning to this sentence given the context, but what I liked about it was the controversy of being "marked." The previous sentence is this

His tone was lined with the demand of intimate debts. His fingers left their much dirty impression over my hands-red marks of manpower.

So the controversy and question raised for me in the hook was about the marks of 'manpower,' its influence, and whether or not it will be challenged later on in this story.

Actually I wonder if the hook might be this instead

Power had become a very controversial topic along the timeline of human history

Which from the POV of all these immortals and gods, is a theme I'm really excited to explore. I wanted to note the hook because 1. There actually is one present, a rarity for this poor reviewer, and 2. It's actually really good. It's thematic, engaging, even a bit controversial, and it's really fascinating within this context. I honestly really wanted to keep reading because of the hook and I wanted to know how the story would explore this theme of 'power' and what it means in this context.

I think this is an ONC story, following the prompt about time travel, and I think the prompt is executed well. One suggestion I have is to flesh out the scene with Varuna in the fourth chapter...there wasn't a description of the environment per-say, the scene wasn't really set before the events happened, so the quick POV change in the middle of the chapter didn't flow well for me and left me a bit lost. You could also take this opportunity to characterize him a bit through descriptions, perhaps character traits and clothing and little environmental story-telling elements like that...this particular scene felt incomplete to me and I think that's what it was lacking.

A bit of a confusing read for me but it has a lot of potential. I think its flaws were small, all the times I was most in the dark were during the sections that didn't have any environmental descriptions, or places in the story where the author didn't 'set the scene' and just jumped into dialogue between brand-new gods previously not mentioned. I do really like the concept though, I think it's incredibly creative, and I think the author is well-equipped to execute a story of this nature competently. With some clarification and some attention paid to environmental story-telling and scene-setting, this will be quite a competitive work in the ONC competition. I hope to come back and see the cover with a winning sticker on it.

See you, Space Cowboy...