Again I liked the excerpt from Memories of Myself, though parts read a little confusing. I’ll go into that in a moment. The chapter’s basically three sections, the reprimand, the stables, and Jin’s downtime. The reprimand shows Jin’s relationship with his exasperated father very well. I don’t really see much point in the stable scene, other than have Jin suffer. From what I remember of your writing you don’t need to spend extra effort now
The chapter wanes until we get to Jin overhearing the girls speak. We get another new word, Pai'asie. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. On its own that’s fine, but you already have a lot of new words that need to be understood. The last scene I liked as well, though Chalinae’s challenge seems foolish, but she’s not much older than Jin and kids will be kids.
Some further remarks, some of what you write is pretty confusing, you seem to change your mind halfway through a sentence. Two ways of saying the same thought in one sentence doesn’t really work. I think I’ve mentioned this before. The first example in this chapter is:
She strung a veil of black silks was placed over my face and all the light was now gone from my world.
The two variants I see are:
She strung a veil of black silks over my face…
And
A veil of black silks was placed over my face…
Something for the proofreading step to fix perhaps, but it might be a good idea to pay a little more attention to it since it happens fairly often.
You write very descriptively, I know I do the same, but I’ve found I often have to cut out a lot of nicely worded descriptions because it brings the pacing way down. Especially when the descriptions occur between parts of the same person speaking, for instance with the couch part at the start of the chapter. I’d cut that description off after ‘going over scrolls and tablets’ and get back into the dialogue. At this point we don’t need anything more than placing Jin’s mother on the couch, the rest of the information isn’t pertinent as far as I can see.
About Jin’s glasses, I don’t remember them from the last draft you did (which is fine) but I also don’t remember them being mentioned in the last chapter (I checked, and this is not fine). Jin notes things there as if he can see everything just fine, but here he can’t see the writing on the papers clearly without glasses. Maybe his eyesight is only a little worse than normal, but it momentarily takes me out of the story so you may want to clarify this.
Another thing I thought of when Talvin was reprimanding Jin is that Jin was easily confused for a slave. For a society that spends so much import on Free Men and slaves, you’d think they’d either mark the slaves VERY clearly or/and have a clear way to signify a free man from a slave, either with a marking or a badge or something.
But then . . . if they really do fall into that category . . . I should really start moving toward that demographic then.
I don’t think you need to move or change the story to a YA demographic. Sure, your main characters are young, with Jin being ten years old, and young protagonists are often seen as a sign of YA, but by that logic with a ten year old character this story is also middle grade ware. I agree with you that the Painted Man is not YA, not by a long shot, and neither is this.
