Aug 14, 2022
These are my thoughts for the first five chapters, not this chapter alone.
I think the premise is good, but it was some of the more minor details that I think hooked me into it. I chuckled at "mediocre Soundcloud mumble rap." Richard is a good dad, and I couldn't help but like him. I even cracked a smile at the bears having a picnic, as cliché as it is.
The allusion to Plato's Cave early on was a good way to clue readers into what was going on a bit. It may be meme'd to death on the Internet today, but I had multiple high school teachers who just loved to talk about Plato's Cave in their curricula, so it also made the school feel more real.
If allusion to Journey to the West was supposed to similarly clue readers in to something, I'm afraid it went over my head.
I thought the story was much improved by the introduction of Ai. As other commenters have noticed, there's something a bit off-putting about her, but I don't think that's a bad thing here. Both MCs are living through a stressful situation, and it's understandable that they would react in different and less-than-perfect ways. It provides a lot of room for character growth.
Which they're going to need. People-watching, or in this case, monster-watching, always strikes me as a tad mean-spirited and ooky.
As far as criticism goes, I had some trouble following the series of events in the bullying scene in chapter 2. I had to re-read it a few times to understand it. Perhaps it was because there were multiple characters introduced simultaneously. If you're planning to revise it, it might help to provide a bit more details about the individual characters as they're introduced.
Also, and this is purely a personal thing, but this story gave me bad flashbacks of struggling to stay awake in my morning classes.
