Title: The Sunflower and her Moon (@Cup0f_rain )
This is a pretty title.
Audience: 13-18
Nothing wrong with this age range just keep in mind it's a wide sort of definition that will land your book in elementary school libraries as well as high school libraries. Like Twilight. If you're aiming for one over the other you can adjust accordingly which in turn will let you lean into either a more mature writing style or a more juvenile one.
Genre: Historical fiction
Initial thoughts: The cover is pretty. The blurb is a little long winded but whatever, let's gooo.
Hook - Oof, dead lover on the first page. That certainly is a hook.
Characters - The characters are lovely and I'm a sucker for outcast found family tropes. However, I notice that Irene in particular doesn't fall into the behavior patterns of a young girl from... however long ago this book is set. And listen, I'm all for firecracker female characters but there is not a person alive today with European ancestors who backtalked their elders with that kind of language.
That little girl is deceased. Her mama smacked the ghosts out of her for speaking like that.
Syntax - The syntax tries to match the olde prose language of historical stories but doesn't quite get there. At least that's what seems to be happening here. Ye Olde Writing Voice is a difficult one to capture accurately.
It could use a little more commitment is this is the style you want to stick with, I noticed a lot of slipping into modern terms like 'straight-up'.
Technicality - Some words were just missing entirely.
Formatting - Very cute formatting, I loved the design for the dividers.
Final thoughts:
6/10 - It could use some work, but that's no surprise. Historical fiction is difficult to tackle and really really detail oriented.
Extra: I have no idea what time this is set in. The opening mentions Corinth and Sparta, and the main character says she's a child of Ephialtes. I assume from context she means Ephialtes of Trachis, the traitor. That puts the story somewhere in the 500-300 B.C. range. But the main character also talks about illustrated storybooks and attends school. Schools weren't established until 1150 A.D. and children weren't allowed in schools until much much later. Like, centuries later. Along a similar line, books weren't book-shaped and illustrated until the middle ages, and most, if not all of them, belonged to monastic libraries or private collections that a child like Katherine wouldn't ever have access to.
Like I said, historical fiction is really detail oriented. I've taken all of one whole library history class and already a lot of the information in this story doesn't mesh. You have to hit the books hard to be able to pull off a historical fiction.
