Justice

I really wanted to like this book. The premise is interesting and the story has potential. Unfortunately, writing a great business letter or college paper is not the same as writing a great novel.
1. The text is not active.
2. There are too many information dumps.
3. The elements that make up a story, dialogue, description, internal dialogue, setting, and conflict are not properly woven together. The writer plops these items into big chunks, rather than weaving them together in small doses. This often causes readers to skim, and skip through the story.
4. The writer over uses inactive to be verbs.
5. Not all, but a large percentage of the dialogue is stiff and not realistic.
6. The writer often ventures outside of the scope of the POV character.
7. I read 50 percent of the story and did not make an emotional connection with the characters. There are many ways to remedy this but the easiest is to include the POV characters visceral responses. I did not encounter any visceral responses.
8. The text could use more white space.

This feedback is meant to be constructive not critical. As I stated before the story has potential. A good developmental/substantive edit could turn thus story around.

I am not posting this review on other sites.

This was a very quick read, as it was a short story. It delved into the idea of how young black men are criminalized and demonized, even when they have no history of getting into trouble.
Justice finds himself being accused of something by one of his favourite teachers, even when the evidence does not point to him doing anything. This is particularly upsetting for Justice, because of the relationship he had with this teacher (who was white). He thought she knew his character better than any other adult at his high school.
This incident highlighted to Justice how quickly you can go from innocent to guilty, as a young black male.