Lol now I'm wondering if I sound like an idiot for not realizing the connection between the paper towel and Greek term. I even put the two lines right next to each other in my crit. Lmao. Ignore everything I've ever said.

A lot of your suggestions are really helpful!

Thomas, the girl and the missing star all get picked up again, but I can understand why it's frustrating when I just mention them and move on (especially at the very beginning of the novel).

The protagonist suffers from a bleeding nose, that's the reason for the bloody towel (and why he knows the greek term for it (which you pointed out is really not the right one \^\^)). I will try to make that clearer!

>Is he listening to see if his weird neighbors are having sex in their weird Christmas shed?

Yes :D

Thanks so much for taking the time!

Hello! So I'm going to do my best to review this, given it's not in its end-language form. You said not to worry about word choice or grammar so I'll ignore that and hopefully what I have left to say is something that's helpful to you. 

**GENERAL IMPRESSION**

Okay so first things first, the voice kept me going through this even when the pace got really slow and then came to a stop. I love voice. It's my favorite aspect of writing. I've said this in other critiques but I'll read chapters of nothing happening as long as it's written with a nice word-feel. So my review will probably be different from others' reviews who weigh pace more heavily than me. 

**HOOK**

> On my lap lies a paper towel that's soaked in blood.

This, obviously. It sucks that this never went anywhere, but it got my attention through the next few paragraphs.

> The Greek word for a bleeding nose is Epistaxis.

This was next. I love the little details about the stars and Greek language, though what I will say is th

__OVERALL__

I'm split on this one. I like the writing, but I'm not sure I'm sold on the story just yet. I would probably give it one more chapter, and drop it if it continued in this way. The main character seems solid enough, and I like a lot of your expressions of character throughout the piece - I think that's probably its strongest point. Your individual details and examples are usually strong; but I don't know why you're chucking /all/ of them at me, particularly when it seems like there's not much to hold them together.

Normally I'd follow this with a mechanics section, but I'll skip that since you're translating it. The character seems to be narrating from the 'present' in the section starting, "A few days ago I turned 18..." I will say it was odd to me that you wrote that section, which seems to be chronologically last, in the past tense, but wrote the sections that take place in the past in the present tense.

__HOOK__

Your third line is your strongest, which I suspect is n

Hello!

Those are the opening chapters of a coming-of-age novel I'm working on:

 [Link](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1anajLmU4R8pKtpAwCjyGcLPdUgitr9K9IT5SbYMZkNY/edit?usp=sharing)

I'm not sure if the beginning is interesting enough to keep you reading. So thoughts and suggestions on that are highly appreciated!

English isn't my first language and once I'm happy with the story I'm going to translate the whole thing into German, so you don't have to go into detail on word choice and grammar.

Here are the critiques I wrote:

 [\[599\]](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/sans53/comment/htwbwft/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;context=3)

 [\[915\]](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/s7voxq/comment/htrpif1/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;context=3)

 [\[1117\]](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/s4yw69/comment/hto29ny/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;context=3)

[2288] Funny hats day