Title

The title is 'Short Stories', a simple title that gets straight to the point. Basically it's a book with short stories, nothing more.

Cover

The cover is a black and white image which is mainly black with clear text that is white and stands out. It does the job as a cover for now, you could change it and try adding colour if you want just to make it stand out a little more but that's totally your choice.

Stories

There's only one story in the book so far which has been entered in a contest as well, good luck with that! The title of the short story is 'The Coming Of Age', I'm not entirely sure what to make of it from the title as I genuinely don't have a clue as to what it could be about, but I am going to have a read of it now and analyse it because that's what I do.

Okay so at first glance, I can see straight away you've used a poetry format and it works really well as each section has four or five separate sentences that make it up. It's quite interesting though because you're telling the story of two sisters who I'm assuming were close before because there was once peace before chaos.

It tells the story of how the girls' relationship was put to the test when the eldest took over, leaving the youngest one full of rage and anger. You've used symbolism throughout the story, the fire representing the younger sibling and the water representing the eldest sibling.

So first of all, fire is quite hot and connotes rage, anger, and danger. This kind of gives an idea of what the younger sibling is capable of doing, however, then you also have water representing the older sibling. Water tends to be more cooled, calm, and collected and I feel like this is the perfect way to describe the older sibling as she has learned lessons from experiences most likely, and so is more mature and wise.

You've been very creative with the way you've written this story and with its layout. The imagery and descriptive language used has so many more deeper meanings than what is seen at first glance.

The imagery used in this short story shows that the two sisters are in fact forces of nature who are separated through their differences. The younger sister is sent deep under the earth to boil and it's her rage and anger that dries out the lakes and causes the drought as she continues to fight against her sister.

The older sibling is portrayed as more calm and cool, almost like she heals everything whilst fire continues damaging it. It's like when you spill some water on a fire to put it out, only it's not completely gone; the embers could spark and a small flame will flicker back up again, and so the fire and water cycle starts again like a fight between the two sisters, between the forces of nature. Fire and water is the symbolism you have used to represent the forces of nature, and I think it's brilliant.

Overall Impression

Overall, I enjoyed the story as I found it very creative and I loved the fact that there was so much imagery used in it. Whilst I was reading it, I kept on analysing and finding different meanings which made me understand more about the sisters.

I don't have any feedback for you to improve it because I thought it was really good. Your writing style and layout was different, but in a good way. The most you can work on is checking for spelling, grammar and punctuation to make sure there's no errors and you could ensure there is consistency throughout each section of the story such as the amount of sentences in each section.

It's very interesting the way you've written it, with the hidden meanings. I can see that a lot of effort has clearly been put into it. I really do hope you win the contest you entered with this story, good luck once again!

Reviewed by: Pixie