Jabberwocky Reviews

30. The Girl Who Was Afraid by LucyAnnWrites

"[EDITING] The year is 1898 and Cerise Verns doesn't want to leave her house. But when her uncle dies without appointing a new guardian, she must face her fears and venture outside to find one herself.

Lost and afraid in the London streets, no one understands the terror in her mind except a young Polish seamstress and an eccentric doctor living in the shadow of his own fears. With their kindness, she begins to put her terror aside and appreciate the world in front of her. Guardianless as she is, she must make fast progress or be shunted into the orphanage, a towering building with a terrible connection to her uncle's past, for good."

Your blurb is clear: it gives a character, some characterization thereof, and what the main plot point is. Even better, we get a character arc: Cerise must learn to become less afraid. Good job here.

Your first few chapters are strong, and I like how you choose details and tone to contribute toward Cerise's characterization and introduce this opening conflict, of her uncle's impending death. The narration and dialogue feel purposeful in a way where some books tend to wander or otherwise never get to a point. Cerise is clearly a compulsive character, and we see this from the beginning—obviously she is afraid too. This clarity of purpose we see here makes the instances where details seem a bit less to the point more jarring: one example of this in my opinion is Dr. Harper's introduction, who is described very uniquely and effectively, but I found details like his dialogue more effective than the fixation on his clothing's color. In the moment it doesn't tell us much, and it's only as we move on that we better understand his character. But this is a small thing, and overall I think you're accomplishing what you set out to do.

There's some exposition in this first chapter that feels forced—the phrase "as you know" is a red flag that you're telling us something in a way that feels forced. They're having this conversation like it's the first time that it's ever come up, but we're also led to believe this has been an ongoing concern of Cerise's: even if this is the first time in recent memory her uncle's been sick, it's certainly not the first time she's gone into his room. To be honest I wouldn't have had as much cause to linger on this paragraph if not for the obvious signposting that the uncle has taken on a duty in the narrative to guide the reader. My hot take is that we don't need this exposition at all: we can make reasonable inferences about the setting, especially since it's one vaguely familiar to many readers, that the girl is probably with her uncle since her parents passed. That's how it typically works. The rest of this scene is great, but the introduction feels unnatural.

Continuing on, I think your development and pacing are strong. Watch again in your prose for hackneyed phrases like "a sigh escaped from her mouth," or "balling hands into fists," that solely because everyone uses them make your reader's gaze wander. Like the "as you know" from earlier. These are balanced out by excellent word choices like "contagious air of cheerfulness" that we could use more of. I feel the good and bad cancel each other out here, and there are some other things like the weirdly short paragraphs (at times they make the text feel jumpy since you're shifting between ideas and moments so quickly) that aren't damning but taken in aggregate mean that I found your prose good enough but not spectacular.

This is another book where I don't find myself needing to say a ton, which is also because what's been posted is a quick read: some of that's the flow, and some of that's also that your chapters are short and this isn't a finished story. If the book were complete I'd probably have more to say. That's not a bad thing, it's just a fact. The ironic thing though is because your chapters are so short, it creates an illusion where the pacing is slower than it actually is. Even ten chapters in, we're still lingering where the blurb left off, if we're even that far. It doesn't feel like much has happened; it feels like we're still in the expository phase, where if someone read the blurb and jumped straight in at chapter 10 or wherever they wouldn't have really "missed" much. This is in contrast to some other books I've reviewed where very quickly things diverge, or there are a lot of layers that we don't get from the blurb alone. But this is also what happens with more straightforward plots.

I think for your intended audience, many of these things I've said are positives, and this is where we get into my broader impressions. This is a good enough book where we're past the threshold of diagnosing issues and to the point where it's more about if I personally was enraptured, if I personally would be reading on if not for a review, if I personally was so enthralled that I wrote thousands of words explaining how there's a symphony of texture and color and whatever else. The fact we're having that conversation means you should be happy with yourself. I don't think I'm your intended audience, and there's nothing wrong with that. You've written a plot that a specific audience can empathize with but is a bit too middle-grade for present-day Eliza to find herself sucked into. Ultimately, as much as my goal is to commend objectively-serviceable writing, it's also to share how I was feeling versus just how I think everyone else reading this might be feeling.

Like I said, I'd have more to say if I had a chance to read more of this, but I think I've read enough to get a feel for where you're at. This is definitely one of the stronger books I've read, but I didn't get enough of a spark that made this go above and beyond for me. I'll give you an 85/100, a very good rating by my standards. Keep up the good work.