Title: GO, DIE & COME BACK by MustafaAsad6
Source: ELGANZA, INC. | AWARDS by TheCieloCommunity
Category: Thriller
Mature: Y (abduction, alcohol, animal cruelty, blood, bullying, classism, death, domestic abuse, illicit drug use, infant death, infidelity, loss of a loved one, medical depictions, miliatry conflict, murder, physical abuse, pregnancy-related issues, rape, sexual assault, sexual references, smoking, strong profanity, suicide, torture, violence)
LGBTQIAP+: N
Status: Complete
Special note (judging): I had four books in this category, and the other judges (HavvySnow, prk_hoonieee, TJDW1989) had four books each.
Result: 73/100

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*****

Rubric:
- Title: 5
- Book cover: 5
- Description (blurb): 5
- Plot & storytelling: 15
- Character development: 10
- Writing style: 10
- Grammar: 10
- Originality & creativity: 10
- Emotional impact: 10
- Pacing & structure: 5
- Accuracy (if non-fiction): 5
- Overall enjoyment & engagement: 10
Total: 100

*****

Total: 73/100

Title: 4/5
My only picky thing here is that I don't like the title being in all uppercase letters. But, otherwise, this is a good, intriguing title, which has been piquing my interest whenever I see it in other awards, so I'm looking forward to reading it.

Cover: 5/5
You know what I just realized? All the colorful stickers are from awards you've won. I've literally been glancing at your cover whenever I see it in other awards and thinking those are an intentional part of the design. They work! The black-and-white background of faces allows for colorful additions, and your title and name are still visible and prominent, so there you go. Perfect cover courtesy of winning awards. 😆

Blurb: 3/5
This blurb is a chaotic mess of details that goes perfectly with an abstract title and a cover full of faces. I love it. Two big-name families turn to crime, and the rest is a rap sheet a mile long. I do have a few editing suggestions here, but I think your content is great, and so is your hook.

First, in the third sentence, there's a singular/plural mismatch. "Everyone" is plural, so "a monster" should be "monsters." This blurb is also in past tense, so the second half of the sentence needs to be in past tense, too, but there's another correlation mismatch here beyond the singular/plural problem. What is "it?" The subject in the first part of the sentence is "avarice," so grammatically speaking, that's what "it" refers to, but I think you're trying to refer to the nouns "power, fame, and wealth." I think I'd rework the second half entirely. Something like this may be better: "...monsters willing to go to any extent to get what they want."

I'd move the next paragraph up to the end of the first paragraph, because you're describing the monsters you introduced in the previous sentence, so it's all one train of thought. I think I'd cut "the" before all the groups, too, and I'm not really sure why. It just feels better to me that way: "Rich miscreants, mafias, goon squads, cops, a genocidal army, and their accomplices..." Maybe it's because "the" refers to specific nouns, which makes it feel like the reader should already know about these groups, and dropping "the" makes this feel more introductory. Then, instead of "brought up," I think "created" would be the better verb. "Brought up" sounds like these groups are talking about mayhem, but they're creating it, hence why I'd switch words there.

For the next line/paragraph, "It's" could technically be a contraction of "It was," but it's more commonly used for "It is," so I'd probably spell out "It was" here to keep with the past tense. The last line/paragraph works in the present tense, though, so I'd leave it alone. It brings the past events of the blurb up to the present, where you leave the reader with questions they'll only find answers to if they read.

Plot & storytelling: 14/15
I won't even attempt to summarize the plot here, because it's way too convoluted. You did a really good job with it. The key to a good mystery/thriller is planning it all out so you can drop hints here and add a crumb there, laying out puzzle pieces the reader doesn't even know they're collecting until you put a few together for them, and you've got that nailed down. I am ashamed to say that I don't know who Rachel is, which is really annoying for me, because I'm usually good at predicting plot twists and spotting threads, like knowing who Nick was the moment you introduced him, and calling a few of the apparent deaths false before I realized basically every death was questionable. (Yes, I know Rachel was in the prologue. But I also know she's connected to somebody in the story somehow, and I can't put my finger on who, how, or why.)

I guess that could be the summary. Nobody is who they say they are, nobody is trustworthy, everybody is against everybody else, every death is open for debate, and nothing is as it seems.

There is a plot hole/realism issue with Nina after she and Kate fight. Kate bashed Nina's head into a wall multiple times and choked her out, too, leaving Nina unbreathing in a pool of blood. Then Nina coughs up blood, mucus, and water, and she starts breathing again. And...she's fine. She's a bit stumbly at first, but within minutes, she's making complex plans and literally on the run in a snowstorm. When she gets to a doctor, all she needs is minor wound care and bandaids. After that much blood loss, head trauma, and strangulation? Not a chance.

Also, the middle section of the epilogue runs really long. It feels less like an epilogue and more like another chapter. I'd recommend either shortening it, which would cut out a lot of the explanation the reader wants, or moving most of it to a regular chapter, which would be the best option, I think. The beginning and end of the epilogue are perfect, though. You just need to cut down the middle to an appropriate length to achieve the correct tone here.

Character development: 5/10
All the characters are pretty much the same. Their physical descriptions differ, but they all think and act the same way, and they all develop the same way, too—negatively. They have positive attributes when they first appear, but the reader quickly realizes all that is a lie, and this person is just as monstrous as that person. Also, aside from an occasional paragraph where someone gets a lengthy description of emotions, facial expressions, and body language, there's very little of that in dialogue. Character interactions are flat and unfeeling, with most of the emotion told to the reader and not shown. Adding more details to your dialogue tags about tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language would really bring life to conversations and characters. This is also where you can differentiate your characters from each other. Maybe Nina has a tendency to bite her lip when she's nervous, or Matt rubs his jaw when he's thinking. Introducing small details like that would add a lot to character development and help one person stand out from the rest.

That being said, the characters are believable in the setting of the story, and they are not static entities. They change and develop as the narrative progresses, although almost always in a negative direction. I would like to say Oswald and Nina gain a more positive light with their dedication to their children, but since they're as willing to lie, kill, cheat, and steal as anybody else to achieve their desired end results, I still don't see any of them as positive characters. Dua is the only exception to that rule. She's the person with the most right to be angry and vengeful, but she's the least murderous of the cast, and of all the senseless deaths of hapless pawns throughout the narrative, I think hers was the most tragic.

Writing style: 7/10
You have a very cold, distant voice throughout the story, which makes perfect sense for a detached narrator telling a tale of death and destruction. There is no judgment; simply facts. The readers are left to draw their own conclusions about who is right, who is wrong, and what, if anything, is justified.

There are a lot of short, choppy sentences throughout this story, and that can get boring for the reader. Trying to add more variety to sentence length and structure would increase reader interest, and it would be fairly easy to combine many of the shorter sentences into compound sentences. Also, paragraph divisions need some work. They get extremely long, even though the overall subject obviously changes at least once, and often multiple times, throughout a paragraph. I'd recommend looking for those topic sentences and splitting paragraphs up at those locations. That will also improve the flow of the story, because it will help direct the reader's mind in the way you want it to go instead of blending everything together.

Often, those long paragraphs start with dialogue. The last sentence in a conversation becomes the first sentence of a huge paragraph, which then leaves that conversation, and often that entire scene, to go off in another direction for a transition. A good rule with dialogue is to keep one speaker (and their actions) in one paragraph, and when the speaker (or actor) changes, or when the subject moves away from the conversation to an author narrative describing the passage of time or a change in setting, start a new paragraph. That will also help the reader follow conversations better, because they expect an A B A flow, where A is one speaker, their dialogue tag, and their actions, and B is the next speaker, their dialogue tag, and their actions. When multiple speakers are in one paragraph, or action gets separated from the correct speaker, there can be a lot of confusion.

Separating speakers will also help with another problem, which is thoughts. You show these with single quotation marks, and they're often in the same paragraph as dialogue, so it gets confusing about what is being said and what is being thought. Organizing paragraphs better would help, but you could also consider putting thoughts in italics and dropping the quotation marks (still following normal dialogue rules for punctuation and capitalization). You don't use italics anywhere in the story, so it would be really easy for the reader to learn any italicized text is a thought, making recognition and differentiation from spoken dialogue much easier:

"Of course I believe you," Matt said, pasting a smile on his face. Yeah, right, he thought.

You have two huge monologues in the story: Oswald's and Dua's. These are tricky, because they almost feel like info dumps, but it makes sense for Oswald and Dua to reveal this information in this way to others. However, they are still speaking, and so these monologues need to sound like something a person would say. That would mean less detail and less coherence. They should not sound like the omniscient third-person narrator. Also, it would not make sense to keep these all jumbled up into one massive paragraph. So, I have two ideas. The first is to modify the monologues to make them sound more natural, and then split them into paragraphs based on topic changes. If you do that, the rule is to use an opening quotation mark at the beginning of each paragraph, but only use one closing quotation mark at the very end of the monologue.

"I'm going to tell you everything that happened. Blah blah blah...

"Blah blah blah...

"Blah blah and blah. All done."

My other idea would be to have Oswald and Dua start the story, and then insert a section divider, switch to italics, and tell the story in third-person narrator form. Then, close out with another section divider, and have Oswald and Dua say their last bit. You wouldn't have to worry about making the dialogue sound natural, and the reader could get the idea of what's happening really quickly. Basically, the monologue starts, and you spirit the reader away to tell them the same story Oswald and Dua are telling whoever, but in your normal author voice and with your normal level of detail, coherence, and chronology. Then, you bring the reader back when Oswald and Dua are finishing up to move on with the scene.

Grammar: 6/10
The issues I noted in the blurb with singular/plural mismatches and slips into present tense happen within the story, too, although they're very uncommon. There are also rare incomplete sentences, missing ending punctuation for sentences or paragraphs, misspellings, and one instance of a missed capitalization at the beginning of a sentence. I won't go into detail with those, because they're so rare that I think you just missed them when you were proofreading.

The first consistent problem is awkward phrasing, which was kind of there in the blurb. Sentences like this don't make sense: "Her straight face was intact by any arrogant smile." I think you're trying to say she maintained a straight face and did not show an arrogant smile, but that isn't clear from the current phrasing.

Sometimes, this happens because of wrong prepositions, like saying someone was "mad at" so-and-so. You used that phrase often with Victoria and Matt when you were trying to say she was making Matt angry on her behalf toward another person, but a literal reading said he was directing his anger toward Victoria. The "at" makes all the difference.

Sometimes, the awkwardness comes from using the wrong form of a certain word. These were three I noted: "athlete figure" should be "athletic figure," "villainy serenity" should be "villainous serenity," and "hardly" should be "hard." Adding -ly to "hard" does not make an adverb that describes the force needed to move something or how solid something feels. "Hardly" means "scarcely" or "barely," like something was "hardly visible." That means you can barely see it.

There were some words of similar sound or spelling that got swapped around for the correct word, too, which again changed the meaning. These are the ones I noted (word used on the left, correct word for context on the right): suppressed/surprised, united/untied, clung and clinging/clunk and clinking, disparate/desperate, bored/borne, confronted/comforted, coked out/cocked, surpassed/passed, sign/sigh.

You also use the slang or colloquial "kept" as meaning "set" or "put," and while that's fine in dialogue, it's better to use the proper terminology in the narrative. There are some pronoun mixups, too, where "her" and "his/him" get switched around, often when used as a possessive description of somebody of the opposite gender. For instance, if Nina is trying to help Nick, he should be described as "her son," but sometimes, he'll be called "his son."

The last and biggest issue is with dialogue tags. Dialogue tags are usually incomplete sentences that directly describe who is speaking and how they're saying it, and they actually count as part of the dialogue. If you ever see "she said," "he asked," "they answered," or anything like that, that's probably a dialogue tag. Unless the first word of the dialogue tag is a proper noun, like a name, it should be lowercase. If the dialogue ends in an exclamation mark or a question mark, the capitalization is the only thing you need to worry about with the transition into the dialogue tag. If the dialogue would normally end in a period, however, change that to a comma.

"Why would you think that?" he asked.
"I don't know," she replied.
"Well, you should know!" he shouted.

The sentence following dialogue is not necessarily a dialogue tag, and if it isn't, end the dialogue normally (period, exclamation mark, question mark) and capitalize the first word of the new sentence. Dialogue tags can also appear before or in the middle of dialogue, too, and again, periods, commas, and capitalization are the things to watch.

"He doesn't know what he's talking about." She turned and walked away without waiting for a reply.
He shouted after her, "Don't walk away from me!"
"You should know," she called over her shoulder, "that I never cared about you."

Originality & creativity: 9/10
There's really no doubt in this department. This story is 100% original to you, and the level of creativity you've displayed in putting it together and telling it to the reader is fantastic. Your descriptions aren't as common as they could be, but when you decide to describe something, I can picture it right away.

Emotional impact: 2/10
For me, the key to this category is a connection with the characters, which I did not get. That goes back to them all being pretty flat and pretty much the same. Working on character development through descriptive detail in dialogue tags would make them more real and more relatable, and thus improve the connection with the reader and the ability for them to empathize.

Pacing & structure: 5/5
Absolutely perfect. As I said earlier, a good mystery/thriller requires a lot of planning and a lot of attention to structure, which you have down pat.

Accuracy (if non-fiction): 5/5
Free points. Yay! 🙂

Overall enjoyment & engagement: 8/10
While I couldn't relate to the characters, this is a gripping thriller that piqued my curiosity and kept giving me questions I wanted to get answered, and the only way to do that was to read. I'm impressed with how you planned this all out, and how you carefully withheld names and switched to vague details to add ambiguity in key places. Who died? Did they really die? What the heck actually happened there? You're really good at doing all that. Also, I'm a little irked that I don't know who Rachel is, and I would appreciate another hint. Please? 🥺