By Ouchia-sensei

Here we go...

BOOK COVER

The book cover, I'm sorry to say, does not attract a lot of attention. I preferred the first cover you had for the book. It looked a lot more attractive. The current front cover seems somewhat unconnected to the storyline. Also, if it's an English version, the title of the story must be written in English. The author's name is visible though, which is good.

FIRST CHAPTER

The first few words give you images of dark campfires, with tribes conspiring together in the dead of the night. Building up such images in the reader's mind is an important task, which has been well-executed here.

However, there were quite a few grammatical and punctuation mistakes. For example, in the sentence- "...and the constant persecution they were suffering from..."- it would be more appropriate to change it to- "...and the constant persecution they faced".

Also, in a few places, the first letter of a paragraph has to be in the uppercase ("Despite their small number...") and the double quotes in some places need to have less space from the word. Given below are a few corrected sentences (you need to find the sentences in the story, sorry!)-

"...blessing at first sight were, at the same time, a curse..." (extra commas have been inserted)

"...victims of a permanent chase..." (the article 'a' has been inserted) 

"...that these people, as dangerous as they can be, will be ..." (an extra comma has been inserted)

"...The RushOmen clan was so powerful that no one had dared to..." (corrections have been made regarding tense errors)

"...three whole

The sentence- "...no matter was the battle it gets into" has to be changed to- "...no matter what battle it got into...". 

SECOND CHAPTER

The dialogues were something that I enjoyed here. They sounded really natural and genuine. They give us quite a lot of information too. A couple of grammatical errors corrected-

"If I knew the story would (not 'will') stick inside your head..."

"...I wouldn't have told (not 'tell')  it to you from the start..."

There are other similar tense-related errors. Since I cannot correct every one of them, I've mentioned a few examples above. Also, when a sentence begins after a full stop or exclamation mark, the first letter of the first word has to be uppercase. These can be corrected in the same way. I would recommend Grammarly to help get higher accuracy with your writing. Apart from this, it was an engaging chapter. The conversations were hilarious and very interesting.

THIRD CHAPTER

Since introducing characters does not come under critiquing, I'll move on to the third chapter.

Here, in a few places, like in previous chapters, you've inserted asterisks (*) so denote action. That isn't necessary because in a story. action can come in between dialogues unless you're writing a play. A few errors corrected-

"...with her small handbag that (not 'who') weighed tons and tons..."

"...on the verge of death with those (not 'that) swollen eyes..."

"...it was like a load had (not 'have) been removed from his..."

There were similar mistakes as mentioned above that need to be corrected. This was an interesting chapter and I liked the part where he meets the old lady. The conversation they had was well-written.

FOURTH CHAPTER

Wow, this was the first time a chapter ended in suspense. Again, I like the humour in the conversations, especially between Max and Theodor. Here, his name has been written as 'TheoDor'. Is this the way it's supposed to be pronounced? I suggest changing it to the conventional 'Theodor'.

Again, the letters have to be capitalised after a full stop or exclamation. Apart from this, it was engaging to read about that strange voice and debate as to what it could have been.

FIFTH CHAPTER

This chapter began with the present tense, leaving me confused. It's a sudden change of tense from the previous chapters. This seemed more like a scene from a play even because of the way the dialogues were written. As much as I found it interesting to read, I would suggest maintaining a sense of uniformity. All the chapters can be written in this way in the present tense or they can all be changed to the past. This sentence had a spelling mistake-

"...That I had to sleep only two (not 'tow') hours in order to finish..."

In the sentence "...pass by you in my new car, miss Maxine..." it isn't clear why he called him 'miss Maxine'. Is it to denote that Max is preachy like a teacher and thus has been sarcastically called 'miss'? Again, I liked the conversations. The humour remained consistent and the dialogues were very realistic.

FINAL NOTE

If the front cover can be changed, 'The Curse of RushOmen' I'm sure, would attract a lot of attention because of its unique-sounding title. However, the abundance of spelling and grammatical errors make it difficult for one to read the chapters without stopping every five lines to ponder over the mistake. If these errors can be corrected, I'm sure there will be a lot more readers due to the interesting storyline and the good dose of humour that is present in the chapters of this book.