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Hi Michele,
I feel a bit awkward to comment on this quality of painting. But since you placed it here, my personal remarks.
You paint the eyelashes very solid. I would prefer to paint them as a series of accents, to break up the solidity.
There is a strong division between the white of the eyeball and the pink or the reddish accent of the corner of the eye (towards the nose). Maybe an accent of a subtle mixture of grey and pink would make this transition a little softer.
For some reason the boy's eyes look very blue to me, maybe a bit more greyish blue would make it even livelier (but it's hard to judge, not having seen the painting in real life.)
The background looks very warm to me, but I like it, it enhances the atmosphere.
I like the contrast between the rougher treatment of the seat and the more refined modelling of the faces. Maybe an even more extreme contrast in the handling of the paint would be possible and bring even more dynamics to your paintings.
Since you placed a book there, playing with the lighting and showing the effect of the light reflected by the white of the pages of the book would have been an option (a subtle lighting of the faces from below). Rembrandt used this effect more than once.
I like the painting very much. The composition of the two figures, the way the boy has his hand on his foot, the placing of the book, the way the girl looks up. (For some reason, I think of the option that the boy looks up with his eyes to where the light is coming from instead of looking in the book, (without changing the position of his face) but I don't know whether that would have been better, perhaps not.)
I hope I didn't sound too nit-picky, since I'm commenting on a very good painting.
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