Sunrise by Jordana Slayer

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kailhofer
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Re: Sunrise by Jordana Slayer

Post by kailhofer »

I’ll agree with Dan that I was a trifle disappointed that Shai turned out to be nothing more than your average teen age girl. The only other thing that bothered me a little was Shai’s struggle when Sayge attacked her. I wondered why Sayge didn’t turn on his super duper vampire charisma and charm the socks off her, as he did with the girl on the Ferris wheel.
<br>I must admit, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I thought she would turn out to be another vampire, a vampire slayer, or something else that preys on the undead.<br><br>That being said, this is the most focused story I've ever seen from someone so young. The average teen tends to be thoroughly unfocused, but bubbling with creative energy that tries to go ten different ways at once. There was some lack of focus, don’t get me wrong. For example: the effort spent to show Shai's room, but then the setting wasn't utilized again. Her room was the most concrete place in the whole story, so it was a shame not to revisit it.<br><br>Professionalism gets high marks. Chances are, at sixteen, Miss Slayer has not made it through all her required English courses, yet crafted a story that was easy to understand. There were a few sentence fragments, compound word confusions such as "business man" instead of "businessman", and some punctuation mistakes--but none of them glaring enough to make one stop reading.<br><br>Setting could use some enhancement. As mentioned above, Shai's room was the only setting described with any real detail. The bookstore probably comes second, but this also is not a much-visited backdrop. As I often nag, using all your senses to describe the world makes for a more concrete setting, and a better read.<br><br>The way this plot was set up made characterization difficult. The first half of the story is all from Sayge's point of view, and, frankly, paints him as a putz. He may be a nightstalker, but he has the hots for a teenager so bad he's willing to take a face full of sunlight just to see her. This also keeps him at a "stalker" level of endearment to the reader and in that he's so unfocused and smitten that he can't feed properly, we don't respect his skills as a predator, either. In this way he's not endearing or engaging, so he can't really be the hero in the story. Later on we figure out that he's the villain, but he muffs that too--Shai is not ready, and opts out, terminally.<br><br>On the flip side, she's a deliberate loner, and that disdain for the rest of humanity that the audience lives in detracts from the impact that her character could have had. She's not all that likeable, except in her passion for books. When she was bitten, I didn't have much sympathy for her. My estimation of her character rose when she chose to fry rather than kill, but I felt it was too late, since we don't really see why she won't go through with it--guilt surfaces, but we don't know from where, based on what we know of her. Also, we never got a sense of what it was she needed in her life to make it right. She never discovers it. That was too bad, because at least if she knew what needed to be fixed, her death would have had some tragedy to it.<br><br>I didn't like the POV change in the middle of the story. I felt this story could have had a greater dramatic impact if it had stayed in the vampires perspective. That way, his character could have grown. Perhaps he could have seen the error of his ways when she chose to die despite his efforts, and make him a hero who tries to save people. Or perhaps she could have died and that made him a worse villain in a kind of tragedy. Or perhaps they both could have run off and frolicked together as some sort of dark romance. in my opinion, any of these options would have made greater impact on the reader.<br><br>At the least, there was information in the story that stated he would know her intimately after the bite, so wait to change the POV until it was logical to do so--after he bites her.<br><br>There was almost no dialogue, but the internal monologues from both characters were done well. Shai read like a teenage girl, as I understand one. Sayge too, was clearly smitten in his vocabulary choices.<br><br><br>This was a good effort, and it showed real promise. In the future, I'd recommend spending more time in building an engaging character, and then centering the plot around that character’s perspective. Then once you've mastered that, go ahead and disregard the rules and break new ground.<br><br>Nate
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