Username: beautifulsnowflakes_

Title: Alive

I don't know why the title is so. I would've understood if he was broken and found the purpose for his life in India. When that's not the point, I don't what to make of it.

Cover: I liked the former cover better. That showed the theme of the book - Travelling. The present one is not capturing my attention.

Summary: Too simple to lure readers in. It says all - no mystery to get attention and didn't show what's gonna be inside. Just his love for travelling which will make the readers think, the book will be a kinda journal.

Create mystery by leaving out the love part - like put him in life changing events and decisions. Kinda...

Story: (My first Review I wrote on your book got deleted accidentally. So I'm going to remember as much as I could and compile it together.)

The opening itself says, he hated the landing and was too anxious about it. And when the pilot says Fasten seatbelts, what's that mean they'll be landing in 10 min, right? How in the hell did he doze off? A nervous man couldn't do that unless he's sedated or bewitched. I don't think it's neither. That doesn't feel so real to me.

The lanky woman with the toddler... If she's the mother, she'll have a slightest of sense to talk to him in English. Again how did he fell asleep with a toddler's cry ringing in his ears?

Movies showing Shackles, farms and poverty? Was he born before our independence? Movies now don't have that poverty touch. Whatever happened to the bubbly teen love, marriage, beautifully dressed biwi's and gorgeous ornaments they were. You need to do some reality check before you write something like this.

Falling in love at first sight, are we? This love thing here is a myth for the generation. And he had travelled a lot. When that happens, he gets to meet a lot, I mean looot of girls. Why would he fell for her? Love at first sight, being beautiful is not at all enough.

The descriptions are bit too much that I dozed off sometimes. Like, "He remembered he had to convert the money he had into rupees."  when just "He remembered, he need to covert his Pounds to rupees/ money exchange" would've suffice. Get straight to the point. Readers ll understand it.

This is happening in almost all lines you have wrote.

And the repetition of "back home" "in London" "second populace city" That's not essential. Readers will remember every bit of important info if you just say them once. When you repeat it in every chapter, readers will get bored of it. Just keep the repetition minimal.

These are for first few chapters. Things got better after 5th chapter with good descriptions. But the first three chapters decide whether the readers ll read ahead or not. Perfect your first chapters.

But I don't know why you've stick to dialogue writing in the latter chapters. The last chapter is full of dialogues and lacks the emotional fill.

The Heartbreak scene should've been from Ally's pov. Caden's didn't work there. You need to put in descriptions as well. See to that.

Negatives:

1) Long awkward sentences. Some sentences are too long that takes up a whole paragraph.

2) Punctuation errors - actually I shouldn't mention it as punctuation errors, cos I didn't see punctuations at all. There are long sentences without a single comma. Place a comma where you need to pause, before/after a noun. You just keep on writing without comma, which makes it hard to read at places.

And the used punctuations are wrong too.

Like, "This is getting out of hands." she said. ✖

This is wrong. Cos the sentence didn't end with the dialogue. The sentence continues even after the close of the quotation mark. Write the sentence without quotation marks.

This is getting out of hands. She said. (?) do you understand what i mean. The above sentence is just choppy ones.

This is getting out of hands, she said. - A complete one.

Same goes when it is within quotation mark too.

3) Grammatical switches: It's not a major issue in your book. Still there are some you need to fix.

4) Descriptions - explained before. Tone down it in the first few chapters.

Plus: I enjoyed reading the Tour around India. Esp, the Agra trip is really good. The story itself is interesting. You have a good vocabulary skills that's suppressed by the long sentences and punctuation mistakes.

Rating: 7/10

Happy Writing :-)

By AtheScrivener