This is accomplished, tightly-constructed literary fiction whose real ceiling is its own control — the polish sometimes performs and the plot skeleton is conventional. Correcting for the known tendency to overrate exactly this finish, I've held two criteria at 7 rather than waving them up.

- **Originality and surprise: 7/10** — weakest passage: "the fat slow kind that can't yet decide if it means it" (a first-snow romance close; the arc — fake-dating → real feeling → withheld secret → she-stays → snow — is fully predictable, and most genuine surprise is micro-reframing rather than plot risk) — strongest passage: "Sixty by seventy-two, cleated, heavier than it looked. Glassine over the face, foam collar, corner blocks, two handlers on the stair, don't let the new guy take the bottom." (love rendered as professional procedure is a fresh lens, sustained across the book) — revision order: introduce one plot-level reversal the profession-lens cannot defuse, and cut or complicate the telegraphed snow ending so the resolution isn't visible from a mile off.

- **Narrative coherence and payoff: 8/10** — weakest passage: "I gave her Asha's name after asking Asha first. I'm taking Dana's room, and I sent Kessler the W-9." (coherent, but the job subplot's proper-noun bookkeeping shows the seam) — strongest passage: "June tore the page clean out along the perforation ... The binder kept its shape and lost its first night." (the Chapter 1 label-correction — "You corrected my label with your coat still on" — pays off causally and reframes the whole book without breaking logic) — revision order: consolidate the Nia/Asha/Dana/Kessler/Tasker/PHL tangle into fewer named entities so payoff isn't slowed by ledger-keeping.

- **Voice and sentence-level craft: 8/10** — weakest passage: "She left it a tower and counted that, privately, as growth." (self-congratulating meta-narration that flatters both character and reader; recurs, e.g. "For Ben, practically skywriting") — strongest passage: "She had quit so far in advance of failing that nobody ever got to watch." (compresses the protagonist's entire psychology into one clean, unshowy line) — revision order: cut the self-approving asides and de-duplicate the signature tics — the "the way people [verb]" similes and the paradox turns — which read as house style rather than character.

- **Imagery and emotional resonance: 8/10** — weakest passage: "After Class. Two underpaintings of one room, finished together." (the resolution image doubles as a thesis statement of the relationship; slightly diagrammatic) — strongest passage: "He'd painted her not knowing she was seen." (the study-reveal lands the book's seen/unseen thread in five words) — revision order: stop captioning the feeling ("That was the ache, standing there with the pipes going") and let the two-underpaintings image carry its meaning unlabeled; the pervasive irony already caps how hard emotion lands, so don't also name it.

- **Technical control without generic polish: 7/10** — weakest passage: "felt her stop being a person in a room and turn into a person in front of a picture, a different and more dangerous thing." (the "a different and more X thing" cadence, the plain-fact-then-ironic-button chapter rhythm, and total significance-saturation — no object is ever inert — betray a style engine running smoothly) — strongest passage: "He found the caterer with the fullest tray and spoke to her, and the tray changed course for the south wall." (control in service of story: invisible, zero ornament) — revision order: retire the recurring polish-tells and let a few objects and sentences be plain and inert; the finish is distinctive enough to survive being less relentless.

- **Book verdict: JUDGE-PASS** (lowest criterion is 7; no criterion ≤ 6). The pass is real but not soft: the two 7s mark a book whose conventional plot bones and machined uniformity are its genuine limits, redeemed by intelligent construction and load-bearing (not empty) imagery.
