Review: Rooming with the Wicked by backto541
Chapters read: 9
Key strengths
Character voice
The use of first person allows for a chatty, informal tone, which works well for this type of story. Ariel has a distinctive character voice and perspective which I enjoyed throughout, like her habit of giving people/creatures she meets their own nicknames, and her generally self-effacing attitude. She's fiery and determined too, always useful traits in a mystery-solving protagonist. Overall, the voice is consistent and there's a good balance between inner dialogue and external action.
World building
One of the biggest challenges in writing fantasy is to create an immersive world that engages the reader without them getting lost. I'm very pleased that this story does an excellent job of that so far. It doesn't care to info dump, and it isn't trying to cram in lots of information at once. Instead, it weaves in the mythology aspects organically as the story progresses, introducing new concepts, creatures, etc as we encounter them, which is exactly the right approach. The introduction of the portal room and Ariel's subsequent trip to another realm is a great example. The story never pauses to tell us what it is, Ariel simply uses the portal and that's all the explanation we need.
The explanations when they do appear are clear and well-written. I was never confused, and I was able to slowly put the pieces together and connect the dots myself (like the fact that the different supernatural beings have their own realms) in a satisfying way. Here's an example:
After seeing a picture of the ancient Ardu trees when I'd barely been old enough to understand that Earth was but one realm, it had been a dream of mine to walk amongst the red-barked giants. (Chapter 8)
Let's just take a moment to appreciate this sentence. It does everything that good world-building ought to do: makes it a point of characterisation, giving insight into who Ariel is and her backstory, it links to what's happening in the story (she's drawing one of the leaves) so it feels organic for the protagonist to think about this, and it casually drops in the fact that there are multiple realms in this world, in case we haven't picked up on that already, without any overt info dumping. It's also evocative, sketching out a complete image in only one line. I salute you and take notes.
Rising tension / action
The writing style flows smoothly and moves along at a brisk pace. The pacing is especially good in the more dramatic scenes. The poisoning in Chapter 3 is a great example, with some lovely language in the build-up:
The subtle scent of rain and something sweet with a hint of spices—licorice, perhaps—surrounded me.
And then the rising tension as Ariel feels that something is wrong. The use of sensory imagery is particularly strong. We get another reference to smell: Licorice and rain... and rot. The callback is effective, and one of those small things that makes the whole scene feel nicely balanced and coherent.
Chapter 4 is another highlight, again starting off slowly building the tension, and as someone who does this myself, I appreciate the technique of mixing up the sentence lengths to keep the scene engaging and using dashes to indicate a sudden pause: Either my senses were playing tricks on me or—
The action in the encounter with the vynari (Fluffy) is equally well done. Again, I was simply appreciating the strength of technique in evidence with how clearly this scene is written, and how well-balanced the pacing is. Really nice work.
The family backstory
I'm here for the hints about what happened to Ariel's mother. The distant father. The awful brother. Give me all of it. It's all very tantalising with these little nuggets of info that are drip fed throughout the story and kept me wanting more. Here's one from Chapter 6:
