MARGARET ETHEL g.a.

This is great! Your character has such a strong, clear voice. I also really liked the way you launched the story, bringing us up to speed pretty quickly without it feeling like too much exposition. Best of luck with this!
Tod
http://authonomy.com/books/40646/the-lost-wink/

YARG 2 Review

Definitely my type of read. Love the tone of your writing. It just keeps me reading and reading and reading...so effortlessly. Wonderful and thank you! High Stars and will put on my shelf asap.

BillyD (David) The Life Inside Maggie Pincus

Hi Bill,

This is a really fun read! Margaret has a really great voice, very real and often humorous. Right from the beginning, my head was filled with questions, "Why did Freddie kill her best friend" and "Why are there so many toilets in heaven?" making me want to read on. Even the guy at the entrance was funny, I like that! I laughed at the W.E.I.R.D. thing..."Wow Everyone Is Really Dead"...The jokes are so simple and sometimes predictable, but I laugh at pretty much anything. My favorite part has to be those last few lines of the chapter.

I didn't really see any typos or awkward sentences while reading your first chapter, then again I'm not very good at proofreading. I did feel like she was a bit repetitive. She constantly jumped from subject to subject but that's how teenagers talk!...At least that's how I talk. I thought it was brilliant.

I had no problem reading this. You've made it simple and entertaining, perfect for the YA audience. Six stars! Best of luck.

Bill, you have an astonishing imagination. YA fantasy is not my usual read, but you make it so funny and compelling that I could not stop reading. As others said already, it is a bit overwritten and spread thin. Reduce to enhance the flavor. I also second the suggestion to add tags or some action to the long dialogues just to give the reader a break. Other than that, it's a great piece of writing!

Iva P. / Fame and Infamy

Hello, there. I thought I would drop by and leave a quick comment. Please feel free to ignore anything you don't agree with.

I really like the start of this. Your MC's tone of voice is engrossing and it drew me in. At times, her narration jumped around a lot and that threw me off. Also, there were some tense slips. "I looked up and no one is in the mirror."<--You have two verbs there, both in different tenses. It's a pretty good idea to keep a story consistent as far as tenses go. Past or present, not both. There are some exceptions of this, but it's rare for the same paragraph and even less likely for the same sentence.

I thought the portal thing was an interesting idea. I didn't like the WEIRD acronym. I was expecting it to be something really creative to combat how flippant the actual acronym is. I would think the people in charge of the afterlife would be more serious. I would believe the acronym more if it stood for something a little more serious. Not sure if I explained that right, but I tried.

One last thing, the dialogue could use some tags or something. Since there are only two people talking, they aren't necessary, but I think having more descriptions would really help the reader keep track of who is talking and keep the reader immersed in your story.

I wish you luck with this.

Best,
RL

These are just my opinions. Please disregard any that you don't agree with or that are just plain dumb (there's always a couple).

There's some very funny lines in here, I thought the premise was well executed. I felt it was a bit overwritten at times and could use some trimming, especially where you use repetition. i realise some of this is to do with voice and getting the teen speak, but i think you manage to convey that fine and the repetition gets in the way a bit, especially when you do it in dialogue with others.

The first paragraph was a bit messy. We don't know Freddie so making sure we don't think it's her telling the story is redundant. And the "It's not every day you..." bit doesn't really help since 'you' could be referring to Freddie talking about herself, about the narrator, or about people in general. In your head it's probably obvious how she means it, and reading on it becomes obvious to me, but at the point that she says it, it isn't. Not that these things are major, but for an opening para I would suggest it's best to avoid these kinds of open-ended variables.

If you were to start the story at "Who ever heard of a girl named Freddie?" would you lose anything? Voice? Exposition? Premise? Setting? I would suggest not. I'm not saying you should start with that, just that the current opening para doesn't have much going for it as far as I can tell (although you should aslo bear in mind that I may not know what the hell I'm talking about).

I'd suggest you be careful not to overuse the "that was a joke/just kidding" type phrases. i know people do say this, maybe teens more than most, but it's usually the sign of a nervous/insecure writer trying to hedge their bets. When you have George say it too, it becomes overtly so. Even if you feel it's true to the voice, be aware that it won't always come across like that.

The margarine joke is a good one, but cooking/spreading is the punchline. The extra three lines after that come across as both overwriting and insecurity. Voice is what she says, not what she thinks about what she says, especially when all she does is repeat herself. If you keep rambling on after the punchline it will detract from the gag.

You seemed to go on about Pearly gates to excess, especially since there aren't any. I think there's probably a good line about the gates in there somewhere, but it's buried under a lot of verbiage. And then you reprise it later with George. Would have been too much even if there had actually been some gates in the story.

The whole wall moving in the bathroom gets very convoluted. I get that the wall moves to get her moving, and the visual of that is great, but the huge explanation of how it moves is very muddled (or perhaps muddling). You start with how it moves when she stops and stops when she moves, and then you switch to how it chases her at full speed (which is the opposite of what you just took great pains to describe). Unnecessarily convoluted, i would suggest.

The hexagon room is also very overwritten. Describing the parts that won't be playing a role in the story (the other corridors) don't require that much detail.

Exchanges like: "It's an acronym/ An acronym?/ Yes an acronym" are very indicative of someone trying to make it sound like natural dialogue through repetition, but it reads like everyone's hard of hearing. And you do it A LOT in the exchanges with George.

Good ending to the second chapter. The funny stuff is great, the narrator is likeable and the premise is pretty clear and easy to get to grips with. You might feel the stuff I pointed out (repetition and overwriting) is there for voice, but I would suggest to you if you took out 90% of it (not what is said, but how you phrase it) the voice would still be there. Her tone and attitude come through fine, in my opinion (for what that's worth).

Despite all that it did make me laugh. Backed.

I really have nothing bad to say about this. Very engaging and great job speaking from a 16 year old's point of view. There were parts that made me laugh hard. I love it. Keep it up.

I really have nothing bad to say about this. Very engaging and great job speaking from a 16 year old's point of view. There were parts that made me laugh hard. I love it. Keep it up.

This is really good. I'll star it for now and make room on the shelf when I've finished reading it.

This is my YARG review.

Great characters! It made me chuckle quite a bit. The voice is spot on, I've been reading a lot of YA lately and this has all the right elements. It's a great idea, too, and a unique view on the afterlife. I see this doing well, both on Authonomy and out in the 'real world'. I have no complaints!

Missy

A YARG from Audrey. I like everything. I worried you would veer off-course with the teen-speak but you kept it as minimal as possible while allowing the reader to note its excess. Nicely done.

Here's what I wonder about: the structure. Why does Just Margaret have to get jerked around by dimwitted George? The level of confusion this adds doesn't seem necessary, particularly when it's not explained. We think we're about to get an explanation from...Myrtle?...then we don't. That was really the only "Huh?" for me. I think you can bring Just Margaret back to visit Seth and Freddie without the confusion. Unless I missed something, you have a grand plan I can't quite conceive of yet.

Let me know if you want a full-on scrubbing by The Hag. She loves her work, but I told her to step back while we took a leisurely read through an early, but very articulate and funny, draft.

~AudreyB

YARG review!
Hilarious! The YA group is sure to love this. Poor Margret. I can't wait to read the rest and see how it ends.
Typo: "no bigger than a marble at might fingertips." 'my' fingertips.
There are a few places were you need periods or commas, but msotly your fine in that area. Nice job.
I'd say more, but thios was so good, I couldn't think of anything!
Noelle J. Alabaster

He-he-he! This is too cute. Funny, entertaining, and fabulously imaginative. Needs proof reading (missing a word early on in chapter one), but otherwise, well done. A delightful tale. Waiting for you to upload more.

YARG review
Top idea for a Young Adult novel. And well executed.
I enjoyed what I read. The voice is just the right tone for this genre, and the light humour adds to the enjoyment.
I only got tripped up by this sentence, I'd take out the first that : ...considering the definition that...
One other minor note, I felt the paragraph about her name went on too long, I really wanted to get to the part about how she died, and skim read that bit. Might just be me, though, see what others think.
Overall seems like you're on another winner here, I'm sure you'll make it to the top again with another top novel.
Best of luck,
Jacoba

YARG Review-
I have quite fallen in love. Picked your book randomly off the YARG list and thrilled that I did! I suppose I could go on for several paragraphs and tell just how much I love this book, but at some point it would get redundant. Margaret Ethel will definitely be on my shelf the next time I rearrange. Absolutely wonderful! Please post more quickly!

Hi Bill. I'm happy to have started this and I'm happy to be the first to read it, I guess.
Backed!
Julia Draper. Do take a look at Jelly-Boy, that is if you can bear the idea of a hungry teenager gutting, cooking and eating a seagull!