Elephant Reviews [CFCU]

The Last Woman on Earth

By @DanielNgo5

First Impressions (ex. Cover, blurb, title)

Title: In our discussion, it came up that the addition of "On Earth" might imply other things instead of what it actually pertained, like if the setting was in outer space for example.

Cover: Excellent cover, we like how the colors reflect the mood/theme of the book.

Blurb: Good blurb that covers all necessary points

Mechanics (ex. Grammar, sentence structure, etc.)

Grammar and sentence structure is good, edited well and few to no errors spotted.

One thing to note is that occasionally there are long stretches of dialogue in which there are no dialogue tags, so following who is saying what can be difficult.

We felt that there was too much dialogue in chapter where the woman is introduced (Part 2)

Plot

It was noticed that some of the slang such as 'lad' and 'wanker' is more British slang, and not Russian.

A lot of concepts, while cool, don't hold up when logically analyzed

-Women (gender) is not a different species. If they understand that there is a male and female within the ape species, they should understand that there is a male and female in the human species.

-There was some inconsistencies in terms of what they understood the concept of love. Could've been where he talked to the girl about Roman and said stuff about loss and admiration and companionship, and the girl should translate it to platonic love, and the similarities & differences between platonic love and romantic love

-The homosexuality issue- Is there sexual impulses on the men or not? There seem to be, if there was a homosexual interaction, but then what do all the other men do? When given limited options, people aren't picky.

Although the choose-your-own-adventure an interesting concept, we would have prefered one ending. Perhaps if you wanted to, integrate the one that makes the most sense and ties up the most loose ends.

There are some parts where there is a lot of information with quite a few names and governmental things, which can be a little overwhelming.

Characters

-We felt like the main character was not the most consistent in terms of motives. Even though there was thought and foreshadowing about the plot twist that he knew he had to get rid of the woman, it still seemed like his actions and thoughts weren't consistent. A suggestion would be illustrating his guilt/tension on decision making.

-The characters are very outdated concepts of femininity- such as crying so much and masculinity- such as never crying. It is understood that this is on purpose, but we just wanted to point out that it is quite extreme.

Overall, we think this is a good story and there's a lot of good execution on ideas. We wish you well on your work!