@darcheron
Genre: Fantasy
Reviewer: StoryWritersNeverLie
Summary:

"Go," Cole told the tears on Lucky's face as he pushed a wide-eyed Leo into his arms and nudged them toward the deep end of the cave. "I love you."

Lucky sobbed harder. "P-please come back. Please don't say that and then not come back."

Cole smiled, but he knew it wasn't a good one when Lucky's face dropped like a stone in water.

Because he knew who Lucky was talking about, and it wasn't Cole.

So all he could say was, "I'll try."

And then Nicolai Holtzer got up and walked to grab his dad's old shotgun, hoping for the first time in his life that he didn't look like his older sister as he left his family behind him.

* * * * *

After their sister turns into a werewolf and leaves them to be discovered in the forest they've been living in for the last nine years, three siblings are left to fix the pieces of their family that broke the night their mother abandoned them there.

Cover: 6/10

The cover is colorful and the words are big enough to be read and also pull in reader, however I'm not sure if it fits with the mood of your story, at least not yet. However it does represent the idea of hiking in monotones, or even being lost in them, or even the thought of the wild life that could live there.

Description: 5/10

We get the feeling that we're dealing with kids who was not only abandoned by their sister but also their mother when they were nothing but infants, and that there is a possibility that the whole family is some part werewolf, or just their older sister. However I don't see it pulling a reader in as we don't learn what the sibling might have to face in dangers, or a hint that others will discover them and that it'll change the sibling lives.

Content: 6/10

Alright so I'll jump right into it and go over the chapters I read and my thoughts on them. We're first introduced to a wolf, which I believe plays an important part in the story, but I found it to have sentences that didn't flow right but that could be because you are trying to get us to see, feel, and hear, through the wolf in the beginning, trying to get the reader to connect with the animal. However by doing this we have things that are repeated as well or cut off when it shouldn't be. One of them times was with the rabbit.

Chapter One had me more then just confused because there didn't seem like a sense of direction when writing it. We learned a lot but even with this information because of where it was placed it would be more of a scattered info dump, which didn't help the reader know what was happening or know what might've been important against what was important. When introducing your characters, including nicknames, you should do it closer together, and it doesn't have to be in the beginning but you should also have only one clear pov at a time. You should include the nickname with the full name so that a reader knows who a character is and what they are called as they continue to read the story.

I also couldn't tell which sibling was who and their gender. Half the time I thought Lucky was a girl because that's how it read to me when you were describing them and when you mentioned them. And I thought Leo was a boy for the same reason. However later on I switched their roles and thought of Lucky as a boy and Leo as the girl, which was confirmed when we were finally introduced to them, however even after that it was clear that the gender of the two kept switching even to the end and in the next chapter.

However, I could tell that the three siblings where close to each other and that they really depended on each other. It was clear they were family and that nothing would change that as long as they stuck together.

Chapter Two we are introduced to more characters and also the environment that they live in and how the world works. As I mentioned before, you should introduced characters with their nicknames, slightly before or after, so that a reader knows who they are reading about and connect the two names together, and I would say to keep it to only one nickname.

There were added words but the chapter flowed much better and less confusing then the first one, which might only be because was more focus on one person. However there were times when something was said or describe that confused me. I've also found that some of the words read more as thoughts then part of a sentence of paragraph, and if you do add thoughts I would suggest italics.

However you do have a interesting story here and it seems to be smoothly falling into place. I like the twist of the werewolf world that we appeared to be in and how Cole, and his sibling, didn't know anything about the world they lived in besides the books they read but I am curious to how they could've survived and how long they had actually ben stranded in that cave.

Next Steps:

When having sometime get interrupted that wasn't in a dialog I would suggest letting the sentence end and starting the next where you would have before, but without the added em-dashes; Introducing characters with their name/nicknames together; Keep up the good work;