Title: PSYCHO

Author: ProjectVN

Genre: Action

PRESENTATION ✿✿✿✿❀

Great cover, my only complaint is I can't read the words above the author name. If you cut that out it would be sooo much cleaner and make my heart leap with joy. I think it captures the gritty, action, superhero vibe you're going for very well.

Your author's note is short and your Part I is actually a good hook, if a bit cliche. However, I don't read superhero books very much because I find the entire genre to be cliche, so I won't take off points. I promise to be as objective as humanly possible. But not superhumanly possible. Or actually just as objective as I feel like being because... let's be honest with one another.

I also like the way you present your chapters and the banner art. It's all very clean and puts out the image you're trying to present. I would've given you a perfect score if it weren't for the "KABOOM" and "HAHAHAHA" graphics in your third chapter. That's just too much, friend.

HOOK ❀❀❀❀❀

The blurb is kind of a mess. It starts off okay, but then it sort of starts going in a whole bunch of different directions and I'm just really confused. 

How does a seizure murder his parents? What does that have to do with eliminating crime? I can assume what you mean is that his seizure causes him to murder his parents, but it still doesn't connect A to B. Spiderman hunts criminals because a thief shot his uncle. Batman goes after them because his parents were killed in a robbery. While your character killing his own parents because of his superpowers is certainly intriguing, I'm still not certain that's what happened, and it doesn't explain why he gets this obsession.

Then there's the last two sentences, which I had to read four times and then dissect into about eight parts in order to understand. 

How did Cadell know he had a long lost brother? Why does he have to confront him? Why does his brother understand his pain? Why does his brother want him to change? 

I realize there are going to be things you can't explain in a blurb, but you gotta try to be clearer than this. At least give us an idea of how the brother fits into Cadell's new life. And definitely give us some more connection between this paragraph and your ending sentence, which I assume is supposed to be a hook. All in all, the premise is good.

The first chapter, though...

Look, I tried. I tried really hard. I was even willing to excuse the melodramatic opening and misleading first sentence. 

But even after we tackle those problems, the POV needs help. The prose is extremely purple and romanticizes simple things like napping in class. 

After we get past the purple prose, there's the melodrama. "He would have traded his soul to believe in nonsense again." This is the second paragraph, my guy. Dial it down. His actions in the following paragraphs─springing up from the table, looking left and right and left and right─are similarly over-the-top. 

Then we have to discuss the dialogue, and the fact that Cadell sounds like an eight-year-old when he's supposed to be eighteen. 

We can skip past the "all my teachers hate me, I just get picked on for no reason" trope, the rather cringe-y way his appearance is introduced, and the fact that Cadell decides hearing voices in his head is intriguing and he should try to talk to it. But we really need to talk about the conversation he has with the voice in his head. 

He doesn't question why he's hearing a voice in his head. He decides to start arguing with it about how he's not going to kill people. He calls it "bud", which is a word I have never in my entire life heard an eighteen-year-old boy use unless it was a sarcastic impression of a redneck. They get into this whole back and forth about the voice not being his brain. The entire thing feels so fake and forced, and then his stomach moans which is not a thing. I'm sorry, but this needs a major overhaul.

It would take me too long to break down the rest of the chapter, but in a nutshell, the writing is stiff and distant from the character. Moving between scenes is awkward. The characters are written, described, and made to act like middle schoolers. I think you might want to consider making this Middle Grade rather than Young Adult. 

GRAMMAR ✿✿✿✿❀

There are some awkward phrases that result from misuse of words or improper verb tenses. There are also some problems with dialogue formatting that are consistent enough to make me think they're not just typos. For the most part, though, your grammar is pretty polished.

PLOT ❀❀❀❀❀

Why do kids always go crazy at school, when nothing interesting is happening? If I had a nickel for every book I'd read that used this trope. 

The first two chapters just dragged on. Everyone is a jerk. Cadell is going crazy. It's the same story I've read so many times before and it wasn't going anywhere. Don't even get me started on the dive into backstory about "The Frenzy", where you went totally out of Cadell's POV and described the most stereotypical of cataclysmic events. 

The third chapter actually picked up, and Cadell's actions felt much less forced. I think you could have spent less time describing the way people were colored in, but overall the scene on the train was good. I was glad he jumped off at that platform; characters are always being idiots and ignoring obvious danger. It's nice to see someone react semi-reasonably. 

However, the whole thing with his mom and the scene at his house didn't make any sense. I understand it's supposed to be confusing, but it really jumps all over the place. His mom says she knows about his symptoms, and he doesn't think to ask her anything about what's going on? Then he goes from being with his mom to waking up. He laughs at some family pictures. His dad comes downstairs trying to kill him. The voice tells him to kill his parents. This all happens in what would be about a page in a real book. It's like, you had two chapters of nothing happening with the plot, and then tried to make up for it by shoving the first important thing to happen into eight paragraphs.

I'm glad things are picking up, but you really need to work out that pacing. My advice would be to skip the dodgeball thing, scale way back on stuff at school, and then spend more time with the train and the woman and a lot more time with the scene at home.

CHARACTERS ❀❀❀❀❀

Every single character here, from Cadell to the gym teacher, feels like a caricature. They're tropes filling the stereotypical roles required for superhero books. 

I can't even appreciate the diversity you're going for here because the characters are so tacky. Making jokes about Sara's face squishing up like she "smelled a fart", or Cadell picking his nose in gym class, and then having nothing remotely unique about any of them to redeem that, is not the way to endear them to me. Sara is "obnoxious bossy girl". Elijah is "eccentric genius best friend", literally. 

As for Cadell himself, he just walks through the plot like a zombie doing whatever the author wants him to do. His actions feel very forced and unnatural. As a character, I don't like him. He's rude to his friends and classmates and he spends most of the time feeling sorry for himself and annoyed at everyone rather than taking action. 

I would advise you to flesh your characters out more. You can't have a well-written book with one-dimensional characters. Once you understand your characters, you'll know how they would act in these situations, and it won't feel so phony.

Also, I'm going to suggest again that you consider changing their ages. They act a lot younger than they're supposed to be. If you changed this to a Middle Grade novel, you could get away with more cliche characters and plots.

ENJOYMENT ❀❀❀❀❀

I'm afraid you're at a disadvantage because I find superhero books to be generally tacky. However, I read and enjoyed Renegades by Marissa Meyer and Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson, so I can appreciate at least some well-written superhero works.

CONCLUSION:

I think you have good ideas, they just need to come through in the writing.

TOTAL SCORE:

8/30