Coop - 10/17/16 - Clouds pt. 6 - 4353 words

[Coop]

Here's the next part. Thanks for reading!

 

Synopsis to this point:

 

Sira is a 12-year-old girl who finds a golden-colored costume in an underground room in the woods. Eventually she figures out that this is a cloudsuit with the ability to solidify clouds. Grappling hook-like devices that she calls “triangulators” enable her to ascend into the clouds.

 

She has been pursued by a male figure dressed in a red cloudsuit. At times he appears harmful; at least once he saved her life.

 

All of this is happening while Sira is stuck on her grandfather’s farm for the summer while her mother is overseas. Grandpa’s seriously disfigured appearance was the source of significant trauma for her as a young child, and she has been unable to overcome these negative feelings for him.

 

In the preceding submission, Sira traps the young adult man in the red suit. He explains that he is her second cousin, home from college for the summer.

[kais]

Overall

Well I'm still engaged and entertained. I like the new plot thread with the war games, although the info dump in chapter got a little intense. Chapter eighteen seemed superfluous. Other than that, I really liked this. I also desperately want Sira and her grandfather to bond over woodworking. That would be amazing.

 

As I go

- page one: my heart is breaking for grandpa a little bit here with the train thing

- OMG please tell me she bonds with grandpa through woodworking. I will buy this book. I will buy this book RIGHT NOW if that happens.

- chapter 18 doesn't do much for me in terms of character development or tension. I'd like to see more tension with Ray, or her finding out about her family, or something along those lines. I also am starting to get antsy to get more information about the forest and where the suits came from

- Ah, I see chapter 19 does all that I wanted above. Which leads me again to wonder what the purpose was of chapter 18

- page 15: getting a little heavy on new detail now. I'm not remember it all

- last page: Huh. *nodding head, digesting*

[Hobbit]

I was super excited to see a little bit of progress between Sira and Grandpa!  Yay!  I've been waiting for that for a while, and it's such a relief to see Sira start to come around.  I basically loved everything about Chapter 17.  My only suggestion was to give us a little more of Sira's reaction after Grandpa's comment at the end of the chapter.  I just wanted more from her there.

The information that we get in Chapter 19 didn't seem like much of a reveal to me.  I felt like we got more information but not more answers, if that makes sense.  I was definitely not expecting robots, and although I like the robots, I'm still left with most of my questions about where this technology came from.  Who made it and why?  I hope we keep getting more answers along these lines.  I hadn't been picturing the tech as late medieval, especially if the suit has a gel component... well, maybe I'm being too serious.

Also, wouldn't Sira have realized that she made it stop raining while she was swinging under the cloud looking for an opening?

Overall, that was fun!

[Mandamon]

I seem to be in agreement with the others.  Overall, this was still enjoyable, but I actually liked the first chapter more than the rest.   Sibi's issues with her Grandfather are interesting.   Jumping around on clouds is fun, but only for so long.  I'm ready for something to happen with Sira and Ray. Wargames seems sort of like filler, unless there's some reason they need to train, and having a whole chapter just to introduce a cloud cutter seems very long.

I'm not fully believing that engineers several centuries ago made the cloud devices and robots.  Did they have help from someone or something else?   As Hobbit says, especially the gel component makes this unlikely.

Notes while reading:

pg 2: "Numerous picture frames hung in seemingly random fashion along the walls "
--of what?  Family?  Grandpa's wife?  Sira? Could be a good chance to show that he really does care.

pg 2: "When she found at the bottom of the chest the tiny wooden bunnies and turtles—her favorites—she squealed."
--awkward sentence

pg 3: ok, you get into the pictures here.  Better.

pg 3: "She resented her grandfather having them—that these connected her to him."
--this is pretty cold.

pg 4: "She had wondered if she could trust him. What she realized now was that she wanted to trust him."
--telling.

pg 6: "But I held my fists tight to my chest. I thought if I made it out with my life and my mind, the next thing I would want were my hands.”
--This is a great detail, and gives some more depth to him.  Makes me even more upset with Sira that she can't see past her prejudices.

pg 7: "button on his index finger 
--button on his finger?  That's a really small button that's going to get pushed accidentally.
--cool device, though

Ch 18--cool, but generally just more cloud-play.  I'm interested to see
what develops between Sira and Ray.

pg 11: Forsooth: He or they?  You use both.

pg 12: “Yep. They’re called sibinauts—named after the Greek engineer Ctesibius.”
--Oddly specific.  Also, I don't see how you get one from the other.

pg 14: bit of an infodump.

Ch 19: so wargames is kinda cool, but I want a reason for all this. At least a hint of where the suits and the robots come from.

 

[Robinski]

Sorry this is so late so, without further ado...

Chapter 17

• “Now she’d forgotten all about it.” – But she hasn’t forgotten about it now, she forgot about it before, he’s just reminded her.
• “was a couch and stuffed chair” – is the couch not stuffed then?
• “an amusement park rollercoaster” – one word.
• “She resented her grandfather having them—that these connected her to him” – Phew, her hatred of grandpa is quite eye-watering at times. I’ve never been convinced at this, that she isn’t old enough to know that the way he looks is not his fault, but was ‘done to him’ by accident. I don’t think she is given enough credit for ‘emotional intelligence’ or insight that we have, even at younger ages.
• “You’ll get to see her again though, right?” – Now, this seems like a big statement, and yet it’s not absolutely clear what she means, I think. We’re talking heaven, right?

Chapter 18

• “She decided she was going up anyway” – Ooh, tense and exciting.
• “She put on the cloudsuit in the bedroom and crawled out the bedroom window” – Previous line suggests you’re going to state the location.
• “She aimed upward and slipped into the sky” – This is disappointing, I want more description of the weather. Is the rain splattering all over, driving her back, getting under her collar? How cold is it?

Chapter 19

• “but your word is better by a million miles” – Eh? I must disagree. Triangulator is a weird name for something that does not triangulate. There’s a joke in UK engineering about sending apprentices out to buy a packet of sky-hooks (or tartan paint), but cloud hook or anchor is a far more sensible name. Must be my engineering brain, but triangulator always irritated me.
• “I woke up going 120 miles an hour” – lol.
• “Vapor-blades break the akintium bonds between the cloud particles” – Wait, the what? Look, we all know what clouds are. You seem to be completing ret-conning the science of water vapour here. I've got to say this is a great big slap in the face. Cloud suits and all the rest of if I'm completely willing to accept, and I don’t want to know how they work, but changing established laws of the physical world bothers me greatly.
• “They’ll be here in a minute” – how does he know this?
• “a creature with the round face of an orangutan” – this feels like repetition after she likened herself to an orang-utan earlier.
• “Illegal,” said Ray” – I'm not really feeling this ‘illegal’ thing. Is it supposed to be funny?
• “what was it doing before you akintelized it” – Ok, we’ve had some explanation now, but see my summary comments.

In summary, the akintelized thing bothered me. I don’t think it was well explained when it first came up that the akintium thing was not a natural process, but something man-made to be deployed in order to control the clouds. It read to me like you had changed the natural processes by which clouds work – and I was not happy about that.

Otherwise, interesting chapter. The halting, mechanised delivery of the robots is probably going to get annoying pretty quickly. Also, the comment from Ray about Sira watching her weight was, I think, in poor taste and inadvisable. Did you say that this was YA? This is not the sort of mindset that you should be imprinting on young girls or boys, or rather not what you should be reinforcing, as it’s a pervasive force in society already.

The scenes with grandpa were good, but Sira’s hatred of him seems beyond the pale at times. Like I'm not sure I even want her to come around, because it’s so hateful and just plain wrong. She has intelligence, resourcefulness, imagination, and yet she can’t see that he is not at fault? I'm just not convinced.

In terms of pacing, I must admit that I think you could change it up a bit. There has been a pattern forming in recent chapters. Sira has awkward moment on the ground; Sira goes up into the clouds; Sira learns stuff; Sira comes back down. I really think you need to mix that pattern up more, break it up so the reader doesn’t latch on it – unless I'm the only one, of course.

I'm hopeful that the next chapter, including the war games, will spice things up a bit, but I'm still on board, and still enjoying the story overall.

<R>