Title: These Wounds Bleed Black (@ElijahColeII )
Audience: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy/Historical/Thriller
Good luck marketing that.
Initial thoughts: We love a good superhero story here.
Hook - The hook appears to be the possibility of time travel set on the backdrop of 9/11. It's a little hard to tell . For sure there's mention of time travel, for sure 9/11 happens, and there's also a scene where the main kid starts bleeding black. A lot happens that's narratively interesting.
Characters - The main character has some (as of yet, undefined) powers and is rotting away in pain and grief at the traumatic event that took his parents away several years prior. It's a character design I can get behind.
He's really the only character that's worth talking about. There's a scientist and a teacher and a psychiatrist and so on but I don't have anything to say about them. They were there. That's all.
Syntax - It errs on the wordy side and I had a hard time getting into it. Maybe I'm tired and cranky but the writing style just wasn't compelling and I can't place my finger on why.
Technicality - Gets a pass. There was a questionable phrase here and there but that's all.
Formatting - Pretty good. Putting the opening speech in center text was a nice way to separate it from the opening scene, although it did make me nervous at first because I thought the whole story was going to be centered like that.
Final thoughts:
7/10 The main character is cool and the idea of time travel is an intriguing one to explore, but the writing style isn't doing it for me.
