Rebel Town Reviews [OPEN]

The Stars Call (Chapters 26 - 30) - @Birdpaw

The Stars Call (Chapters 26 - 30) by Birdpaw

Reviewed by AmyMarieZ

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Overview: Taking place after the end of a long war between the Galactic Sanctum and the First Insurgency, The Stars Call follows a group of mercenaries hired by the Sanctum to research and fight a deadly virus destroying the galaxy. By chapters 26 – 30, the situation has escalated as planets are locking down their borders, worried about imminent attacks from rebel forces.

Grammar: Overall, the grammar in this selection of chapters from The Stars Call was good. The one thing that jumped out to me as an area for improvement was sentence structure. I have left notes inline pointing out places where I felt like sentences were awkwardly worded, hindering the flow of the narration. Many of these awkwardly worded sentences contain comma splices. Another grammatical error that hindered the flow of the narration was frequent incomplete sentences and the use of fragments. The story itself is strong and entertaining and the writing style is good, but I think that smoothing out the narration in the rough areas could make it shine even more.

Pace: The pacing in chapter 26 felt a bit slow to me. It seemed like a great deal of time was dedicated to dialog at the beginning of the chapter where characters explain what happened in the previous chapter to other characters that were not present. Since as a reader I already know what happened and got to see how it affected the characters that were present, it seemed a bit repetitive. I think it might work nicely to abbreviate the dialog here, keeping a small set of really hard-hitting lines but trimming out the rest of it. Showing the characters discussing what happened could work well to built up the suspense and intensity of what is going on, but when there is too much of it, it drags the plot slightly.

The pacing in chapter 27 and 28 were well done. The constant action and excitement kept me pulled into the story and engaged from beginning to end in chapter 27. The intense character development in chapter 28 drove the chapter along. My one suggestion for pacing in these two chapters would be to spend just a bit more time on scene development, specifically of Kestra in chapter 27 and the layout of the ship in chapter 28. I thought showing a bit more detail of the characters moving from one location to the other in chapter 28 (specifically Nyra going to the arena) could have helped me visualize the scene a bit more easily.

For the most part, the pacing in chapter 29 was well done. I could feel the tension in the scene when Mara was figuring out the relationship between the mutated Gorgot and the virus. That really pushed the scene along. My one suggestion for pacing in this chapter would be to cut out scene changes where possible. The beginning of the chapter particularly seemed to have a few scene changes that, with a bit of tweaking to the action of the chapter, could possibly be omitted. I think removing the scene where the characters find out they are going to the spaceport could get the chapter to the exciting interesting part a bit quicker, and then the information could be provided through dialog later without any confusion.

The pace definitely picked up in chapter 30. It was action packed and full of excitement when the characters encounter some dangerous pirates and the spaceport goes into a lockdown.

Character Development: I really liked how the tension between the crew members was portrayed as Keren was flying the scout ship back to the main ship. I could sense how on edge all of the members of the crew were, especially since they all had a lot of questions about what exactly had happed with the nightmare goo. However, the characterization fell a bit flat to me once they got back to the ship. As I mentioned in the "pacing" section, it seemed like points I'd already seen a lot of development on were rehashed (for example more discussion of the trauma Aelius had been through), and I didn't get too much more out of it. I think making the dialog a bit snappier and briefer could have been more effective here.