Jabberwocky Reviews

40. The Dragon's Daughter by LisaKugler4

"Seventeen-year-old Raina Brandt has never fit in. A physical disability means she's bullied at school by popular kids like Hector, and only her two best friends, Jess and Sy, seem to understand her. But despite this, Raina thinks she's got life all figured out. Until, one day, a shopping trip for lip gloss turns into a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. Everyone around her seems to have developed weird magical powers. Well, everyone but her. Jess can appear anywhere, Hector can read minds- and Sy, well, Sy's gone missing.

Raina would give anything for things to go back to the way they were and a mysterious and handsome stranger offers her just that, as long as she does something for him in return. But things aren't quite what they seem, especially when Raina discovers she's even more powerful than she could have ever imagined.

Now, it's up to Raina to figure out how to exist in a new world of uncertainty and decide where her loyalties lie. Hanging in the balance is the life of her friend and possibly the fate of magic itself."

I think your blurb gets the point across. Phrases like "things aren't quite as they seem" are ones I've talked about as being indicators you're either veering into cliche territory or telling us something the reader should already know. I think the point would come across anyway condensing the last two paragraphs and making it more clear that "Sy's gone missing, Raina needs to get ahold of herself and take this one" is the conflict here.

Going into the first chapter, I think your first paragraphs need to do more to ground the reader, in the sense it takes us many paragraphs to figure out who's actually the subject of the action here. We don't have an idea of setting or mood: people we haven't met are yelling at each other and kneeing each other in the cojones. This is partially because there are a lot of emotional descriptions and very few visual or otherwise concrete descriptions: it's nice we know that someone is angry, but we at least need a vague idea of who that someone is first or else we're putting the cart before the horse. By the end of the chapter some of these are clarified, but that doesn't fix that we're still orphaned to begin with.

Brief interlude prose-wise: there are some fairly consistent vocab mistakes (Ivy League is capitalized, book titles like Lord of the Flies are italicized, etc.), and the thought I had as I was looking out for more of these is that most young adult books I've read don't mention Norman Rockwell and Dolly Parton, or even Lord of the Flies, a book I imagine most people who've been to an American high school have read. I'm all for cultural references, but these and some other ideas created a sense of distance from what I imagine is trying to be a fairly faithful description of a high school setting. With the first book I reviewed, a very much not-YA book that a lot of Wattpad readers struggled with partially because there's a vast cultural lexicon woven throughout that belies the appearances the subject matter would create, there were so many people I noticed in the comments who said they didn't recognize the paintings, that no high school student would wear a sweater or take calculus as a freshman, that they felt excluded by references they didn't understand. Regardless of what the reasonable objective opinion would say about whether these sorts of things are fair game (I think they are in kids' literature), the way they're delivered here felt unbelievable as something written from a teen's perspective with the aim of appealing to fellow teens. Tossing copies of Die Hard around isn't going to appeal to people who these days probably use Netflix and Hulu more, and who most likely haven't seen Die Hard: you may as well have thrown in a "Yippee-ki-yay" in there to make sure people are even more confused. Instead of references like these supplanting the narrative (I'll get back to this later), they felt like desperate attempts at cross-sectional appeal that also were out-of-place.

In writing there are a lot of ways to tackle realistic subject matter, and there's a reason why accountants and stay-at-home parents aren't frequent subjects of literary works: they aren't associated with doing much, well, exciting stuff. So with any realistic material, high school included, there's a trade-off between being faithful to real life and writing in a way that transports. Even going past the first few chapters into where people start flying and multiplying and doing things that normal high school students don't do, the manner of narration—heavy on sequences of actions and unusually specific details—makes it seem like the dust bunny on Raina's skirt hem is as important as the anarchy around her or the college decisions in the first two chapters. She doesn't act like they're that important, and she goes extremely quickly into telling us more about her ever-expanding cast of classmates as if nothing happened. This happens not just because of the details you're choosing to emphasize but because the flow of your sentences becomes stilted when you have the same structures repeatedly: "I cut him off with my silence by grabbing my sandwich and leaving the table. I headed to my room to eat. I left the college envelopes where they say." Short repetitions of "I verbed and then I verbed again" and so on, with a lack of variety in participles or punctuation, emphasize this uniformity. Varying sentences, breaking up the predictable cadence of the writing, makes for more interesting reading: just because this is YA doesn't mean that readers aren't going to appreciate this.

I tapped out at the end of chapter 6, not necessarily because I gave up reading at that point but more because I thought I'd read enough to write this review. In these first six chapters a lot happened on paper, but I didn't feel like we'd really left the "hi here's who I am these are my friends" opening stage: the plot didn't feel like it had begun, nor was there a lot of ongoing development that necessitated me pushing on to figure out what happened. I want to shift here to a comparison with the first book I reviewed, You Must Remember This, since I know you had some thoughts on what you read and because I think it's coming from a similar place but landed on its feet more. Where I felt at times your book tried too hard to be mundane and accurate to what a teenager's live reactions to events would be, which might be realistic but also is not the sort of escapism or wild perspective we look to books for, that book went in the opposite direction: instead of the plot being shackled to teens whose most sizable worries are college acceptances, the plot goes where it wants and the characters follow, even if maybe teens don't start cults or gaslight their peers on a daily basis (maybe they do that last point). Many interactions are realistic, but the realism creates a broader structure, a broader point, than "congratulations this is a teenager who worries about teenager things": the details which stand out as being idiosyncratic for teens, who typically don't quote Shakespeare or worry about moral relativism, feel less like Easter eggs and more like parts of a whole. I was willing to forget that it wasn't meant to be a faithful, candid camera, depiction of life, and this fact was reincorporated into the narrative, like folding layers in pastry, to create more, well, layers. On a more practical note, there was more "interesting" prose and a tighter sense of plot/development, where I felt the characters were invested in what was happening and I consequently was too.

Given improvement is the goal here, prose-level edits would help you the most in quick and easy improvements. Setting aside plot or if the youth these days know who Bruce Willis is, I'd have read more if the writing were more dynamic. I've discussed plenty already how to work on that, and the best way to improve on this front is reading more spectacular prose and seeing what makes it tick. I also think with how the story is told, there's this imbalance where even though it's ostensibly a story for kids there are too many decisions made that make it feel like it's a simulacrum of teenager thought, things like the movie references and whatnot. Somehow the story is so realistic it loses its intrigue, and too much of an attempted recreation of how kids think for me to empathize effectively. If you want to write from this distant perspective where your readers have seen '80s films, because it's a perspective you're most familiar with, use it to your advantage.

I think your story has more potential in the long-term to be this self-aware, halfway-in-between story simply executed with more aplomb than a YA story but written in an uncanny valley perspective, but you could go either way. If you want this to feel truly YA, read more YA: especially read more on Wattpad, where norms differ from what you would find at your local bookstore. Read the comments and see what people are vibing with—and how they're using phrases like that. If you want to embrace your adult, mature, experienced perspective, I think reading You Must Remember This (the sequel is probably less helpful for the purpose of improving this specific novel but it's good, if you can stomach getting that far) will point you in the direction of writing about teens implausibly in a way that carries the narrative persuasively, and that doesn't feel like it's trying to hollowly imitate them. I'll give you a 75/100. There's a good foundation here but I did not find myself resonating with this as much as I should.