Thank you to everyone who read the last chapter. I appreciate it. I've had that in my drafts for a while and wasn't sure when to post it, so I appreciate all the support I got on it.

Congratulations to all the winners!

If I tagged anyone wrong, please let me know so I can fix it asap! This category went through some sh*t with multiple people backing out and new people coming in to fill those slots, so if you don't see yourself and you're 110% sure you applied for this category, please let me know since my notes are a little all over the place for this one.

I ask that when you're reading your reviews, you read the whole thing before asking questions. Sometimes it takes me more than one paragraph to explain what I mean, so your question could be answered later in the review.

I'm one person doing this and trying to be as helpful as I can. If nothing about the review is helpful to you, then just ignore it. I'm not going to be offended. We're all different writers using different styles, so my suggestions may sound outlandish to you while to my style they would fit in perfectly. I always, and I mean always, encourage you to find your own style and don't just blindly listen to my suggestions because I'm the one giving them. I'm not always right, and my opinion is one in a sea of billions. Please keep that in mind while reading your review.

With the new Wattpad guidelines, I am going to be censoring more words than normal just to be safe, so if you see any censored words, that's why.

There are five total winners. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place as well as two honorable mentions.

Only seven categories left. I am currently judging best fanfic, romance, and ongoing. Best fanfic will take time as it is a huge category.

I will be doing one final contest for the summer, and it will be released in early July. Like, in the first week if not the first day. My next contest won't be until at least fall, so when my last summer one releases, I highly suggest signing up ASAP. 

It is called the Candlelight Awards, and it will feature a brand new category type along with new prizes. Different types of stories, like poetry, originals, fanfics, oneshots, etc. will be accepted. It is a more general contest, so there won't be many restrictions, and the read count restriction has been changed from 150k to 500k.

3rd Place

The Unshadowed by IredescentRose

Congratulations on winning third place!

Review:

Characters: 7/10. The characters service the story well and do what they need to to push the plot forward in a natural way. They all have their own motivations—understandable motivations—that drive them forward. Demian is a serviceable protagonist, but there are other characters along the way who give him challenges and new adventures, such as Cole, Luciu, and Civic. All in all, the characters are good. They have clear traits, motivations, and purposes in the plot.

This may seem like an odd thing to say, but considering this is a sci-fi story, be careful with character reactions and making them a little more tonally consistent. When Demian sees the creatures with wings for the first time, his reaction is "You guys have....wings." He just got thrown across the room by creatures with wings holding a woman captive. I imagine his first words would be more like "What the f*ck are you?" "Are those f*cking wings?" "What did you do to me?" or just anything that expresses more anger, panic, confusion, etc. He got thrown all the way across the room. It is a miracle he can even form a coherent sentence, that's why I'm saying it felt a little tonally off to have his first words to be to point out the obvious when he should have a million other priorities on his mind. So when characters are reacting to sci-fi things, be careful with making sure they're tonally consistent with the scene.

And that isn't the only time this happens, which is why I'm bringing it up. It happens again in the same chapter. After establishing that Demian was horrified and overwhelmed, when he comes to, one of his first thoughts is that he looks hotter than he did before. He just got turned into an inhuman entity against his will, got kidnapped, is being held hostage by strangers, and has no idea where he is. It's one thing if you characterize him as someone who's easy-going, cocky, doesn't have a will to live so he doesn't care what happens to him, etc., but it's like the characterizations are battling against one another because he was clearly panicked and overwhelmed just a couple paragraphs before that hotness line, and also he frantically searched for the woman and seemed very panicked in the forest. It just seems a little off to me that his first thought when he sees his new form is to talk about how much hotter he is when he was turned into one against his will. I hope when I break it down like that, it makes sense why these character reactions felt very tonally inconsistent and also not consistent with the characterization you did before.

In general, Demian kind of just accepts everything pretty fast, which is overwhelming for the audience. Even if the character is established as easy-going, he's too easy-going even for an easy-going character. That's why I recommend a bit more tonal consistency with him and the other characters to make the scenes more immersive.

I also have some suggestions for the dialogue to make it sound more natural, though I will discuss that later.

Overall, the characters are good, there could just be some tweaks to the tone and dialogue.

Plot: 7.5/10. The core story idea is very cool and very sci-fi. Right from the start, the story makes it clear that it's intense and will unload themes of depression and overcoming past failures. Throughout the entire runtime, I was hooked on the sci-fi world and storyline with the irangels. I didn't notice any plot holes or inconsistencies. My criticisms have to do with the beginning of the story.

There are some tone issues. Like I mentioned in the characters section, some of the character reactions felt way too calm for the situations they were in. Beyond what I mentioned before about Demian saying that line, he doesn't really show any signs of panic, which is weird since he showed more panic outside in the forest than he did inside in front of strangers with wings who just threw him. Why? If he was a calm and collected individual, then don't characterize him as emotional in that opening scene where he gets angry at his memories and panics when he hears a stranger yelling.

While on the topic of that scene, I'd find it a little more believable if they knocked him out and turned him into one of them first before spilling the beans to him about everything. It's not a big deal and more of a nitpick than anything else, but I found myself wondering why they were so comfortable revealing everything to him when they didn't have him restrained in any way and he could form a plan to leave. But this could help with the exposition problem in the beginning where everything is kinda dumped on the audience all at once. So what you could do is have that opening scene and take your time with it, then Demian stumbles upon the lab and is knocked out. Maybe he wakes up to see his entire body changed, and the thing the chapter ends with is Slashed Hoodie coming up to him, and Demian realizes he's been kidnapped by an inhuman species. It's a pretty gripping hook that gives the audience a lot of information without overwhelming them, and that can cut the chapter down to about 15 minutes. Then the exposition can be saved for the next chapter when the audience is more ready and interested, if that makes sense.

I also have some critiques of the pacing, but I will get into that in the next section.

Pacing: 6/10. The pacing finds its footing later in the story when new characters are introduced and given a role in the plot; however, for the beginning few chapters, the pacing really takes a hit and fluctuates between too fast and too slow. Since the first few chapters are crucial for hooking readers in, I recommend making sure the pacing is more even throughout the full story, not just the later parts.

Be careful you aren't putting in descriptions for the sake of putting in descriptions. Remember style doesn't make a story, a story makes a story. In the first chapter, it takes seven full paragraphs until we really get anything of substance. Do we need to watch him go on a drive? Do we really need to start with a crow unimportant to the plot of that chapter? Do we really need to start with the word "sunlight" being repeated over and over? Why not start with "He could still see those awful images in his mind from over a year ago..."? That's far more hooking than starting with a leisurely drive. The point of the first chapter is to hook your readers in as fast as possible, including the first line. The first line is one of the most important lines in the story, and the first line here is four lines long describing a crow that really doesn't matter to that chapter.

While on the topic, the story goes from zero to one hundred real fast. Like I said above, we got a long scene of him driving, then as soon as he gets to the woods, everything goes lightning fast and we get a ton of exposition of these whacky concepts. I like whacky concepts don't get me wrong, though the chapter is 31 minutes long and we're not even halfway through when we're getting all this exposition. That's a lot to dump on the reader and then expect them to read for another 15 minutes to get to the end of the chapter. I have no problem with long chapters, but be careful you aren't overwhelming the reader with too much in one chapter. The contents of the first chapter alone could have been 2-4 chapters because of how much happens. Be careful with making chapters too long since your chapters, more often than not, have enough content for 2-6 chapters if not more. Like I said, I have 0 problem with long chapters. I myself like them, so it's not that. It's more making sure the long chapters are necessary and not overwhelming. Like chapter 4 is over an hour long. Does it need to be an hour long, is what I'm challenging you to ask yourself.

The pacing kind of fluctuates between really fast and really slow, so I suggest finding more of a balance and revealing things more gradually, giving the reader more chances to process what's going on, and set up characters and plot events more coherently. Like Demian just kinda masters his new abilities by chapter 2 to the point where he knows how to grant someone else access to his memories. It's a lot to take in, and that's why I recommend breaking up chapters more and giving us more time to understand what's going on. You're writing a whacky conceptual sci-fi concept, which is great. I personally love these kinds of concepts, so I encourage you to keep writing them. Though when you do, keep in mind as the author, you know everything. We don't, so it can be overwhelming if you're giving us too much at once, and for me, it was extremely overwhelming, but not in a way where I felt overwhelmed with Demian, I felt isolated and overwhelmed.

But as I mentioned earlier, the pacing does balance out later as more characters are introduced, like the scenes with Orion and Yuri are far stronger paced and make more sense. So that's good and the pacing is overall good once we hit the later parts of the story.

Creativity: 7.5/10. The story idea, like I mentioned in the plot section, is really, really cool. I love these otherworldly concepts mixing in with the contemporary world. It's an awesome story idea centering around experimentation and the dangers of discrimination, depression, and traumatic events. Sounds like a pretty cool concept, right? You'd be right, cause it is. So, overall, the creativity is good, and my suggestions are all about the word choice.

Be careful with repetitive word choice. In the first chapter alone, I lost count of how many times you said a form of sun (like sunlight) and cloud(y). Similarly, be careful with adverbs, and also be careful with going overboard with the adverb you use. Keep in mind adverbs are telling over showing, so you already don't want to use too many since that means you're doing more telling over showing, but if you're using over-the-top adverbs, that adds a cherry on top since now you're not only using a bunch of adverbs, but also adverbs that make readers stop and wonder what they mean. For example, surreptitiously. I don't even know what that means and I'm an English major. Was that adverb necessary? Could you have described the plan with more detail and showing over telling? Could you have at least simplified the adverb so it doesn't confuse the audience and call attention to the telling over showing you're doing? It's fine to do telling over showing; every writer needs to, after all. But any area you can cut down on unnecessary telling over showing is recommended.

The overall creativity is good.

Dialogue: 7.5/10. The dialogue is overall good throughout the narrative. It gets better the more the story goes on since the characters gain more dynamic and interesting speech styles that make them feel more individual, and as the expository dialogue fades away, we replace it with more interesting and unique dialogue that made the story more engaging. Dialogue tags are done correctly, too, so great job there. I have two suggestions, one of which being major since it's telling over showing.

Be careful with using semicolons in dialogue. Humans don't really speak in a way that warrants semicolon usage, and semicolons, more often than not, overcomplicate sentences. Especially when the characters are emotional. Sometimes you'll have emotional characters, but you'll use semicolons for their dialogue, which doesn't fit in with the emotions in the scene. You have to be pretty well-spoken to have semicolons in your dialogue, so I find it hard to believe someone frantic would have the sense to speak in much of a coherent way let alone coherent enough to warrant semicolon usage.

The main suggestion I have is to not use as many dialogue tags since they're telling over showing, so the more you use, the more bland the tags will get and also the more attention you're calling to your telling over showing. Near the beginning of the story, you did this well and didn't have as many tags, but later in the story, you started overusing them. For example, in chapter 18, look at the conversation between Orion and Yuri and see how many of those lines have tags. A lot of them do, and it's just a conversation between two people. There's no need to have tags for almost all the lines when it's a convo between two people. It's one thing if there are three or more, but it's just those two. I believe 24/26 of the lines of dialogue have tags, but I'd argue you don't even need 12 tags. That's why I recommend downsizing and doing more showing over telling in that regard.

Worldbuilding: 8.5/10. The world is one of the strongest elements in the story since it is a conceptual sci-fi with many different moving parts, and I think that works in the novel's favor. I really like the concepts going on here and also the environments. While I have my critiques for some of the descriptions feeling unnecessary, I still overall liked the descriptions pertaining to the environments, and everything felt clear in that sense.

My main critique is what I said before about the world being dumped on us rather fast, not giving us a chance to experience it as cinematically and comprehensibility as we could have. It got overwhelming super fast, and it took time before I started to really catch on to what was happening and how it was happening. It took over two chapters for that to happen, which is over an hour of read time. That's a long time to go without fully comprehending what's going on, which is why I made those pacing and plot suggestions earlier. Other than that, I liked the worldbuilding and think it's one of the strongest parts of the story.

Grammar/Spelling: 9/10. The grammar and spelling throughout the story is consistently very good, and there were never any immersion-breaking grammar/spelling errors, meaning I don't have much to say about this category other than to keep up the good work and one suggestion.

The only critique I have is to be careful not to overuse semicolons. It's to the point where, like I mentioned earlier, you even use them in frantic dialogue where it doesn't make much sense for there to be semicolons since they're a formal punctuation mark. So just make sure you're using them very carefully, is what I'm trying to say.

There were no other consistent errors I noticed. Occasional editing errors here and there, but that's expected for long books, so nothing of note to point out. Overall, very good spelling/grammar.

Description: 7/10. The descriptions are overall strong and do a good job hooking the reader in. The environments are described well, as are all the character appearances. I don't have any doubts in my mind about how the main characters, like Demian, look. You also incorporate the five senses into your work to make the scenes more vivid, and I can always appreciate it when an author experiments with the five senses to make more cinematic moments.

Be careful with telling over showing. Like I mentioned earlier, there was an overuse of adverbs, but there are also many times you'll directly tell us when a character is "very sad" or angry or horrified or happy, etc. It's fine to do telling over showing, and it's necessary in every novel, though any area you can downsize is recommended.

Like I mentioned earlier, be careful you aren't putting in descriptions for the sake of it. Make sure each one counts toward something and it isn't just out of obligation or for sake of wanting to sound prettier, otherwise the pacing will drag. Like the opening with the crow didn't feel like it went anywhere, and it could have been far stronger to start right in the woods instead of showing the crow and the long drive.

Also the adverb thing I talked about earlier, but since I mentioned it here and also went in detail about it in the creativity section, I won't go into detail about it again here.

The descriptions are overall good and make sense for the story, I just recommend some tweaks to where you place your descriptions, the telling over showing, and the adverbs.

Themes and Emotions: 7/10. The themes and emotions throughout the narrative are good, and I like the way you use otherworldly species to commentate on human emotions and problems. I'm a sucker for that kind of narrative, and I think you did a good job with it here. The themes of discrimination and experimentation were well-done, and there were plenty of other subthemes to take away from this novel.

My critiques are things I said earlier about making sure everything is tonally consistent, not overusing telling over showing, and making sure the dialogue fits what's going on in the scene. The emotions and themes are still strong, and they could be even stronger with those tweaks. Sometimes I got pulled out of the moment from the tone issues, so that's my main critique here.

Title/Blurb/Cover: 6.5/10. The title is cool and hints at what's to come. I've seen many titles with shadows before, but not quite in the Unshadowed way, so I think it's also pretty original. For that reason, I have no criticisms for the title.

This is the blurb:

Demian Daggers finds a glass building in Wachstyen Forest that holds dark secrets within, secrets involving experimentation and loss. A massacre leads to a new creation of irangels ― humans who have turned into sparkly winged humanoid alien beings called Iredescents. With the discovery of new abilities emerges the Black Rose, the most powerful irangel of them all.

A rogue irangel rises to power, causing a division between the irangels associated with Demian and those who follow the rogue irangel. A fight atop an aerospace station leads the irangels on an unexpected voyage to Iredescent, the planet of their origin. Nothing will ever be the same for both planet Earth and planet Iredescent now that the irangel secret has been uncovered.

The blurb is overall colorful and interesting, though I have some grammar suggestions to make the blurb a little more concise and readable.

What I'd recommend:

Demian Daggers finds a glass building in Wachstyen Forest holding dark secrets involving experimentation and loss. A massacre leads to a new creation of irangels―humans who have turned into sparkly-winged humanoid alien beings called Iredescents. With the discovery of new abilities emerges the Black Rose, the most powerful irangel.

A rogue irangel rises to power, causing a division between the irangels associated with Demian and those who follow the rogue. A fight atop an aerospace station leads the irangels on an unexpected voyage to Iredescent, the planet of their origin. Nothing will ever be the same for Earth and Iredescent now that the irangel secret has been uncovered.

I didn't make too many changes, but I removed some unnecessary words and tweaked the first and last sentences in particular to have more active wording.

So the blurb is overall good, I just suggest a few tweaks to the conciseness.

The cover is overall okay. I like the bird having a mirror of itself on the top right, and I also like the style choice of having a wing stretch across the screen to act as the title card. With that being said, I have a couple of suggestions. For one, I'm not a huge fan of the "The Irangel Beginning" at the bottom simply because it's white and in plain font, completely different from the title and author's name. Having three different fonts and font colors on one cover was a bit distracting, in my opinion. Secondly, I wasn't a fan of the title hanging off the wing since it's a wood background, so the brown color of the title blends in a bit, and it also looks a little off to have only a tiny part of it hanging off the wing. Only two letters of the Unshadowed are hanging off, which is why it felt a little off. That being said, I like the font for the author's name and the roses sprouting around the wing. Other than those two critiques, I like the cover.

Total: 73.5/100.

2nd Place

Raven and Rue by ella_rowan

Congratulations on winning second place!

Review:

Characters: 8.5/10. The characters throughout Raven and Rue are interesting. I'll talk about the themes of isolation later, but Pip works as a protagonist who feels isolated within himself since he has few people to turn to. Even his own father shuts down and doubts him. This is a small thing, but I like how Pip has Finn throughout the narrative up until the last scene. Having something follow him around and ground him was an interesting way to give Pip an outlet to express himself and his talents. Mrs. Bennett was great as well, and although the mom dies early, I think she was a great addition that gave a heartwarming feel to the first few chapters. The future characters, like Bernard, work for the narrative too, and I like how Pip and Bernard ended up together. I overall like the characters.

My main critique is that the dialogue could use some tweaks to make it more emotional, dynamic, and engaging. I'll explain more of what I mean in the dialogue section, where I already wrote a detailed explanation for what I'm saying here; however, I thought I'd mention it here to explain where the deductions come from and also as a precursor to the dialogue section. The characters are good, their dialogue could just use some tweaks to make it more emotional and immersive, but I'll get into that later.

Plot: 10/10. The plot of the story follows main character Pip as his entire life crumbles around him, and he has to fight to figure out his place in his world, and also think about his mysterious ability to speak with animals when no one else, including his own father, believes him. I think that's a pretty cool concept blending fantasy with gritty, realistic environments that feel like Game of Thrones met Lord of the Rings. It's easy for all these fantastical and historical elements to fail at blending together, but I think you did a good job making them feel coherent. I didn't notice any plot holes or inconsistencies. The pacing is also pretty good aside from one critique I have of the beginning chapters, but it's not big enough to warrant taking off points here. No criticisms for the plot.

Pacing: 8.5/10. The pacing throughout the story is good and reveals information about the plot and characters at a good rate. Later in the book, the chapters have solid endings and beginnings that don't feel rushed while also not feeling too slow.

The only critique I have is it feels the first five chapters or so feel like they were lingering and trying to find their footing. It starts very slow, and it takes a while to get to the mother's death. I feel you could consider downsizing to get there. Not because I dislike the intro sequences, but because I honestly forgot Pip spoke to animals by the time we got to the mother's death, so it does take a while to get from point A to point B. I have absolutely no issue with slow pacing whatsoever. I myself write slow-paced stories, so it's more about being careful it's not too slow, if that makes sense.

But the overall pacing is good, especially later in the story.

Creativity: 8/10. Like I mentioned in the plot section, the story idea is strong and is one of the highlights of the story. Along with that, it's executed well with no noticeable inconsistencies or plot holes, or at least no immersion-breaking ones. The concept and the rich world are what make this section so highly scored, and my only critique is about word choice.

Let's talk about adverbs. Adverbs are telling over showing, so the more of them you use, the more telling over showing you're doing. You use a bunch of adverbs per chapter, so that's why I suggest downsizing on them, especially since you often use adverbs to describe dialogue tags. I'll talk about that more in the next section, though you could benefit from doing a little more showing over telling in dialogue and relying less on adverbs and dialogue tags to give the words more weight since, like I said, adverbs are telling over showing. It's okay to use them here and there, though try not to overuse them, is what I'm saying. Especially the adverbs ending with -ly. Other adverbs, like "just" and "still," are more forgivable since they serve purposes for emphasis (as long as you aren't overusing them), but the -ly words in particular are what I'm suggesting you try to downsize on. I hope that makes sense.

Dialogue: 6/10. Dialogue tags are done correctly 💃💃💃💃

I really like how you included dialect. I'll mention it again throughout the review, but I always admire it when an author researches to make their dialogue more realistic to the world they're creating. I overall like the dialogue, though I have four critiques. I'll start small then get into the more important ones.

Be careful with awkward dialogue. I respect and admire the dedication to including dialect and making it accurate to the time period, though be careful you're not going too complicated or overly formal with it because that led to confusing dialogue that, if you read it out loud, doesn't make sense. For example: "Did you never wonder why a house this size didn't have a dozen servants to care for it, and not just one old woman?" The presence of the second "not" is what kinda throws the sentence off. It's almost like you meant the sentence to be reversed with "Did you never wonder why only one old woman took care of a house this size and not a dozen servants?" However, I still think a more natural alternative would be: ""Did you never wonder why a house this size didn't have a dozen servants to care for it?" I don't think you need the last part since it throws off the meaning of the sentence unnecessarily and also makes it longer than it needs to be.

What I'll get into next is actions as tags. I'm talking words like chuckled, smiled, sneered, hissed, etc. being used as dialogue tags. You don't do this too often, but often enough to be noticeable. Actions as tags are unnatural because dialogue tags tag dialogue, not people. You can say words, shout them, ask them, etc., but you can't chuckle them, sneer them, hiss them, etc. That's why it's unnatural because by saying something like "he chuckled" as a tag, you're implying the words are chuckling, not the person. Luckily, this is an easy fix. Here are two alternatives:

He chuckled. "*insert dialogue here*."

"*Insert dialogue here*," he said with a chuckle.

Those are great ways to include the chuckle but still make it natural. I hope that makes sense.

My next suggestion is to not be as reliant on adverbs. If you read a chapter like chapter 4, you'll see much of the emotion is reliant on the dialogue tag and adverbs. Like Pip talks excitedly, or Mrs. Bennett says something worriedly, or Pip says something ruefully, etc. There's a lot of tags (I'll get into this in a moment), and many of these tags are paired by adverbs. Don't tell us Pip is excited, show it. This is also your chance to characterize Pip. How does he get excited? Does he clap his hands? Jump up and down? Does his voice squeak and crack? That's not to say you never do these things because you do, but consider doing them more and relying less on tags/adverbs to carry the emotion.

The last suggestion I have is to downsize on how many dialogue tags you use. I'd recommend the 50-30 advice of dialogue tags. This advice states that of your dialogue, 50% or less should be tagged, and of that 50%, 30% or more should be said or asked. I can't recall if I said this in my last review for you or not, so I will go into detail here just in case I didn't before. So the reason publishers and authors hate tags is because they're telling over showing and bog the word count for very little benefit. Their one and only purpose is to tell the reader who's speaking, and when that's paired with the adverb problem, the dialogue becomes less engaging because the characters are talking at us, but we don't have as much going on around the dialogue. To put this into perspective, in chapter 4, you had 26 paragraphs including dialogue, and of that 26, 25 had dialogue tags, and many of those had adverbs attached to them. So what I recommend is considering downsizing on how many tags you use and also how many adverbs you attach to the tags.

Worldbuilding: 10/10. The worldbuilding is the strongest part of the story, featuring an interesting world and vivid environmental descriptions that give the novel an extra push to make it more immersive. As I mentioned in the dialogue section, the slang and use of dialect makes the world feel more consistent and coherent. The way the concepts are introduced to us are good and revealed at a good rate, and the world itself is cool. All in all, good worldbuilding, and I have no criticisms for it.

Grammar/Spelling: 7/10. The English style is consistent, the dialect is consistent, and the grammar/spelling is overall good. I don't think I noticed any spelling errors, and I'm willing to bet if I did, it was just slang anyway. So, overall, good job with the grammar/spelling.

The critiques I have are all about the punctuation since there are consistent and frequent punctuation errors.

Be careful with unnecessary semicolons. Semicolons tend to overcomplicate sentences, and while I'm not saying never use them, make sure each use is purposeful. For example, this semicolon: "If Pip felt that he was slipping, he whispered to Finn to slow down a little until he could right himself; once they began galloping, he let Finn know he needed to hold onto his neck...". I didn't see the purpose of using a semicolon here instead of just making it two sentences. The sentences didn't feel very related, or at least not related enough to warrant a semicolon there instead of a period/full stop. So that's why I recommend being careful with semicolons since they have a tendency to overcomplicate sentences.

Similarly, there are some punctuation errors with commas. For example: "One afternoon a swallow spoke to Pip on its way south for the winter, telling him that in the valley it had just flown over, it had seen a great many brightly dressed people living on the common in little houses on wheels, and there were horses grazing in the grass." There needs to be a comma after "afternoon." There are a few times throughout the story you'll have an introductory phrase but no comma after it, though in most cases, you need a comma after them.

The last thing I'll mention is compound predicates. You have a frequent error where you'll use commas in compound predicates when you don't need them. When the same subject is doing two actions, you don't need a comma between them. For example: Pip kissed back with lips sticky with sugar, and fell asleep, thinking he must be the luckiest boy in the world (chap 2). The comma after "sugar" and before "and" is incorrect because this is a compound predicate sentence. Pip is doing both actions of the kiss and falling asleep, so you don't need a comma. If you read it out loud first with the pause then without it, you'll notice it's far more natural to say without the pause. This happens again in chapter 3 with: Mrs Bennett sat tirelessly by her mistress' bedside, feeding her broth, and herbal teas she had made herself, wiping her hands and face with a damp cloth to cool her. The comma after "broth" is incorrect. This is a very frequent error that happens a good 5+ times per chapter, including in dialogue, so that's why I'm spending so much time on it.

Otherwise, the grammar/spelling is very good.

Description: 6.5/10. The descriptions throughout the story are interesting and fleshed out well, particularly those of the environments as I mentioned in the worldbuilding section. The descriptions give the reader the information they need to understand what's going on. I overall like the descriptions here and think they set the perfect atmosphere for the story. It definitely has that historical feel.

Be careful with director's notes, which is a type of telling over showing. I already covered the adverb problem earlier, but there were other times you gave the readers what I like to call director's notes, or short moments of telling that feel like notes left in by you, the author, to direct us, the reader, to what we need to know or feel. For example: "...and her singing was in the house from dawn to dusk, for she loved music." The "for she loved music" is the director's note. That entire sentences already showed us she loved music, so why repeat the same information we learned twice in a less engaging way? It was a short moment of telling where you directed the audience to what they need to know even though we can already conclude that based on what you showed us. Trust your audience to pick up on those things because we will. We can tell she loves music based on her personality, so don't directly tell us the character personalities. It means a lot more when they're shown, not told.

Also be careful with passive voice. There were times you used passive voice unnecessarily. For example, the same sentence I used before: "One afternoon a swallow spoke to Pip on its way south for the winter, telling him that in the valley it had just flown over, it had seen a great many brightly dressed people living on the common in little houses on wheels, and there were horses grazing in the grass. Pip knew it must be a circus being held in the nearby market town, and his head became filled with thoughts of seeing horses and their riders perform there." Mostly the second sentence. There is no need for any of the passive voice there, and it makes the sentence clunky unnecessarily. Here's what I recommend: "Pip knew it must be a circus in the nearby market town, and his head filled with thoughts of seeing horses and their riders performing." You don't need to say "became filled," and you also don't need "being held." Those uses of passive voice weren't necessary, and if you read it out loud once with the passive voice then without it, you'll notice it flows far smoother without it.

While on the topic, be careful with wordy sentences and making the sentences too long. That first sentence is way too long and could have been split up for easier readability. This sentence: "One afternoon a swallow spoke to Pip on its way south for the winter, telling him that in the valley it had just flown over, it had seen a great many brightly dressed people living on the common in little houses on wheels, and there were horses grazing in the grass." Consider this: "One afternoon, a swallow spoke to Pip on its way south for the winter, telling him it had seen brightly dressed people living on the common in little houses on wheels, and there were horses grazing in the grass." There's no point in using "a great" there, and "many" was an unnecessary adverb. You're already using multiple adverbs in this paragraph, so any area to downsize is recommended since adverbs are telling over showing.

Themes and Emotions: 7.5/10. The themes and emotions are interesting and service the story well. I think the idea of a happy-go-lucky boy getting his entire life torn away from him is interesting and worthy of praise. I like these types of stories where the main character has to mature and mature in like 0.5 seconds because everything is taken away from them too fast. Bonus points since it isn't Pip's fault for things being taken away. He can't control his mother's sickness or the financial decisions his parents made as young adults. He can't control the judgment of the town, who frown upon his talents. He can quite literally only rely on himself and a few select others, like Mrs. Bennett. Otherwise, he's isolated. All of that is to say I like this theme of isolation and how it's presented throughout the story.

My critiques are the same things I've talked about throughout the review with being careful with director's notes/telling over showing, using less adverbs, using less dialogue tags and putting more around the dialogue, etc. Since I already explained them throughout the review, I won't go into detail here, though I am happy to answer any questions!

Title/Blurb/Cover: 7/10. Alright, alright... let's get it out of the way: my name is Raven, the book title has Raven in it. Am I biased? Absolutely. Do I regret being biased? Absolutely not. Raven is a sick a$$ name, bro. The title is good and sums up the story well, rolls off the tongue well, and is a cute play on words. No criticisms.

The blurb is overall okay and tells the reader exactly what they need to know about the story, though I have a few critiques. For one, I wasn't a fan of the use of not one but two alternate fonts. Not only does this make it hard for readers with conditions like dyslexia to read, but it's also impossible for screenreaders to read. However, it goes beyond that: it's inconsistent. You have one special font for the first four lines, then standard text, then a brand new special font for the last line. Do you see why that's a little inconsistent? You have cursive on the cover, then bold special font, then standard text, then a special italicized font. I know that may seem like a nitpick, but it can be hard on the eyes to jump between different font styles, especially since they aren't just italics or bold, they're special fonts with specific dimensions that differ from the standard text.

But I understand that boils down to personal opinion, so moving more objectively, there are a couple of grammar errors with the blurb. I'll start with the special font then get into the standard text. The last line is: "Who is Raven? And who is Rue?" This is a minor thing, but for flow purposes, I feel it would flow better without the question mark between them: "Who is Raven, and who is Rue?" It's a small change, but it helps with flow. Moving into the standard text, this is the blurb:

Pip is the happiest boy in the kingdom of Lindensea, until he loses everything and becomes the saddest boy in the world. Falling in love with a dishevelled young nobleman who is leaving the kingdom seems like a piece of foolishness that will only break his heart.

It took hard work and determination for Pip to survive. It will take time, luck, and a sprinkle of magic for a chance at true happiness. But are the stars on his side, or working against him?

The comma in the first sentence isn't needed since this is a compound predicate sentence, as I mentioned in the grammar section. Pip is doing the second action of losing everything, so it's not needed to have the comma. The comma in the last sentence is wrong and should be "But are the stars on his side or working against him?" for the same reason: it's a compound predicate sentence.

Moving more into the core of the blurb, it works and tells us what we need to know, though I feel it could be more eye-catching. The first sentence is very vague and uses simple adjectives, so it doesn't evoke much emotion out of the reader, which is why I'd suggest rewording it or replacing it with a sentence more eye-catching that will give more specifics about the story. What does he lose? Why does he lose it? How does it directly impact his life? You don't need to answer all or even one of those questions, but they're questions to keep in mind while writing blurbs. You don't have to give that many spoilers out if you don't want to, though the first sentence doesn't give us any incentive to read because there's no stakes. We don't know Pip, so during the blurb, try to get us to know him at least a little bit and give us a reason to care about what he's losing, if that makes sense.

The second sentence has "piece of foolishness," but I feel that's very clunky and could be shortened to something like "Falling in love with a dishevelled young nobleman who is leaving the kingdom will likely only break his heart." I'm the last person to suggest adding an adverb since I dislike them, though the "piece of foolishness" feels clunky, and this is one of the only times I'll say an adverb may work better there since it shortens the sentence significantly and gets to the sentiment/emotion faster.

So all in all, the blurb is okay and gives a general rundown of the story, though it could use some tweaks to help it stand out more.

The cover is very pretty and I like how it's presented to us. It definitely captures the vibe of the story well. The picture is nicely done, and I like how you have the castle within the silhouette. The only minor critique I have is I'm not a huge fan of the font. The curls on tops of the Rs feel a little much, and I feel another cursive or elegant font may fit in with the cover more. But those are just my personal thoughts and I'm not a cover designer, so I'd get second opinions about the font before changing anything. Like I established earlier, my name is Raven. I write in cursive, so I see a cursive R every day and feel the standard cursive may be a bit smoother on the cover since it will also give us a little more of the castle since the font is covering a lot of it. But again, that's just my personal thoughts, and I'm far from a graphic designer. I otherwise really like the cover and think it works well with the story. Very pretty visuals.

Total: 79/100.

1st Place

But Then I Fell in Love by Jahools

Congratulations on winning first place!

Review:

Characters: 8.5/10. The characters and themes are the two selling points of the narrative as this is a story talking about the impacts of ab/se and how toxic relationships can change one's life forever. Yoongi is the lens through which this story is told in terms of its themes, though the POV focus is more on BTS and their struggle to try and free Yoongi from a relationship he insists isn't bad for him. It's a back-and-forth "battle" between them, but it's more like a battle to save Yoongi's mentality.

I overall like the characters in the narrative and think they do a good job elevating the themes and emotions. Yoongi and Jungkook are the leads, and as leads, they're engaging. Jungkook has an intriguing backstory that you don't give away too soon. You give us time to theorize what could be up with him. Yoongi also has a great character where you sympathize for him, and I like how his personality alters depending on who's watching. The whole of BTS have at least one specific trait assigned to them to give them more diversity from one another. I know I'm biased since I howl like a pack of wolves during the first full moon of the year whenever I see him, but I liked Jimin in this, too. I thought it was interesting how you spun his character and how he handles tense situations. All of them were good and had highlights to them.

I only have minor criticisms. I'll explain this in more detail later, but there were a lot of telling over showing moments that took away from otherwise tense and interesting scenes. Don't get me wrong, the scenes were still good, though I felt you could have done less telling over showing and given us more to work with in terms of raw emotions. For example, Yoongi has a lot of nervous looks, but don't tell us that, show us that. I'll explain more later about that point in particular.

The other criticism I have is that some of the dialogue is a little clunky, making it hard to follow what the characters are saying at times; however, this is another thing I'll talk about in more detail later.

Other than those two things that I'll talk about more later, the characters are good.

Plot: 9/10. The plot shows Min Yoongi in an ab/sive relationship with a man named Chul, and it follows the BTS members as they attempt to get him out of it. I liked a lot of things about the plot, like how they went to a therapist to see the best course of action, and also Jungkook's entire involvement. Everything feels like it makes sense and is fluid. I didn't notice any plot holes or inconsistencies.

The only criticism I have for the plot is the first chapter is super exposition-heavy. I'll talk more about it in the pacing section, but a first chapter is better suited for setting the reader in the immediate conflict, and chapter 2 had more of that than chapter 1. Most of chapter 1 was exposition and didn't really get into the plot, but again, I'll explain that in far more detail with suggestions in the next section, but I thought I'd mention it here as a precursor to it.

Otherwise, the plot is good.

Pacing: 8/10. The pacing is overall good throughout the story, especially later in the story after Chul is arrested where the pacing has a balanced feel and information is revealed to Yoongi at a solid pace that makes sense for the plot and the characters. My main criticisms are about the first few chapters, but afterwards, I liked the pacing.

The first chapter is a little too slow for my liking since we get exposition on almost every BTS member. Vmin get their own section and Hobi is included in that, then we get exposition about Yoongi, Namjoon, and Jin in the first two sections. That's a lot of exposition for the first chapter, and honestly, I was far more hooked by "It started with a bruise" in chapter 2 than all of chapter one because that line is super eye-catching and sets the tone right off the bat. Remember you have the entire story for exposition. Almost all of the exposition given in chapter 1 could have been moved later since it wasn't essential to understanding their current situation. I feel chapter 2 works better as chapter 1 since it's more hooking, and a lot of the exposition told in chapter 1 is shown in chapter 2. For example, you told us Jimin is observant in chapter 1, but that's shown in chapter 2 by you showing us Jimin noticing all these bruises, so we no longer needed the exposition to tell us Jimin is observant because you showed us in a far more effective way. We also don't need to have a solid understanding of everything happening to be hooked. Just knowing Yoongi is being ab/sed can be enough to hook everyone in.

I'm spending so much time on this because it's your first chapter, but I felt far more hooked by chapter 2 than chapter 1. It's important to feel that hook by chapter 1. That's why I recommend considering rearranging it to have chapter 1 and 2 maybe combined a bit where you start with the bruise line and give exposition only where absolutely necessary.

The only other minor thing is be careful with how many ab/se scenes you show. Not because it's bad to show those things but because the more you show them, the less impact they'll have, and also the more repetitive they'll get. I understand that probably sounds cruel to say, but from a storytelling perspective, the more you do something, the less impact it has. By chapter 9, I was getting a little tired of all the ab/se scenes, and I felt some of them could have been trimmed or removed. Especially since chapter 9 is the big blow up one, consider trimming some of the other scenes so chapter 9 has a far more impactful horror aspect to it. It's already horrifying, but think of it like Alien. I don't know if you've seen that movie, but it's a classic horror movie that barely shows the monster. We only get glimpses of it. When we finally see it, it's a disgusting creature that's truly terrifying. So maybe think of it like that. Consider giving us one scene, like the one with Jimin, that firmly establishes the ab/se happening, then the rest are more vague and trimmed down to keep audiences in the dark, then in chapter 9, we really go into detail. And I don't mean detail as in like you need to describe every second, but give us that brutal reality check where we realize the monster in the shadows is like a xenomorph.

Creativity: 6.5/10. The story idea is about raising awareness for ab/se and the realities of dealing with it. It's not as simple as calling the police. In fact, that's normally the opposite of what onlookers should do because it can make the situation far worse. It's a situation that's handled with delicacy, and this story aims to show the strenuous process that comes with it. I think that's a cool idea, and I think you handled it maturely with a proper tone and intriguing elements that I'll talk about throughout the review, such as Yoongi's nervous ticks and things like that. All in all, the creativity is good, especially with the concept. My recommendations all have to do with filler words, word choice, and adverbs.

Be careful with filler words, like "that." In many cases, the word "that" isn't needed in sentences. Here are two examples: "So he'll understand that that could be the case" and, "My fear is that Namjoon will immediately try to intervene, and that that will make Yoongi's situation with Chul even worse." I'll mention it again in the dialogue section, but some of the dialogue felt a little overly formal and awkward because of the filler words, and that sentence is a primary example. I understand Jimin is like the EAP of South Korea and he uses words in Korean I don't even know the definitions of in English, but this sentence still felt a little awkward, in my opinion. What I'd recommend: "I'm scared Namjoon will [try to] intervene, and that'll make Yoongi's situation [even] worse."

But I'll talk about that later in more detail. Focusing on the that epidemic, I think only two of the four that's you used are needed. So, this: "So he'll understand that could be the case" and "My fear is Namjoon will immediately try to intervene, and that'll [or that will] make Yoongi's situation with Chul even worse." Do you see how the meaning of the sentence doesn't change? It means the same thing, only smoother and easier to read. I understand what you were trying to do with the second that and why you used it, but it wasn't needed. It's not grammatically incorrect to omit the second that's in those sentences. I strongly suggest looking at sentences with the word "that" in them and reading them out loud first with the "that" then without it to see how it flows. In most cases, "that" isn't needed and is grammatically fine to omit. It doesn't cost you anything and it improves flow, so that's why I'm recommending it. I know it may seem like a small thing, but it massively improves readability. If you look at the sentences without the second that's and read them out loud first with the second ones then without them, you'll notice how much smoother and more natural they sound, and they're grammatically correct.

Moving away from filler words, let's talk about repetitive word choice and adverbs since they go hand-in-hand here. You use a lot of adverbs, and I'd suggest downsizing. Your writing is descriptive and complex enough that you don't need to rely on adverbs to tell the emotion for you. For example, in chapter 4, you use about 66 adverbs. It's only 11 minutes long, so you can do the math on how many adverbs readers are seeing per minute. The general recommendation is no more than one adverb per 300 words, but I disagree with this and think it's stronger to go with no more than one per 500-1000 words (depending on why you're using them, like using more adverbs in dialogue is a little more acceptable because we use adverbs like "just," "always," "still," and "never" in our speech a lot), but be careful not to use them unnecessarily. For example, you use conversationally twice in chapter 4, but I felt neither of them were necessary since we already knew that was what Jungkook was doing. When it comes to repetitive word choice, you overuse certain words like "just." Seeing as "just" is an emphasis word as well as an adverb, the more you use it, the less emphasis it has. The same applies to exclamation marks. The more you use them, the less impact they have, so I recommend downsizing wherever possible. One of my old English teachers said that exclamation marks should be saved for situations like "I'm pregnant!" and I honestly agree. Anywhere you can limit them, I recommend it.

Dialogue: 8/10. The dialogue throughout the story is strong and does a good job portraying the emotions. The dialogue tags are done correctly, which grants you 5 bonus points and a warm cookie. However, outside of the correct tags, the dialogue is strong and feels well-placed. There's also a lot happening around the dialogue, like Yoongi looking around and searching for Chul during the coffee shop scene with Jungkook. So, overall, the dialogue feels well-rounded and interesting.

My criticisms are what I mentioned earlier about some of the dialogue being awkward. I went into detail about the presence of filler words in dialogue making some of it awkward, so I won't go into detail about it here, but I'd like to break this line "My fear is that Namjoon will immediately try to intervene, and that that will make Yoongi's situation with Chul even worse" down a little further.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because Jimin's speech style is inconsistent. Sometimes he'll talk like the EAP of South Korea, and other times he sounds similar to the rest of the boys and doesn't have a distinct flair to him. That's not a big deal because he isn't a main character, but the problem is Jungkook is like this too. Sometimes he'll talk like the EAP of South Korea, and other times his dialogue blends in with the other boys. That's why I was focusing on that line. It was very formal and didn't sound like natural dialogue, but that would be fine if it was a style choice; however, it wasn't because that kind of dialogue is only every once in a while, and it also happens for Jikook, not just Jimin. That's why I'd recommend more consistency with the dialogue style, especially since "My fear is that Namjoon will immediately try to intervene, and that that will make Yoongi's situation with Chul even worse" has noticeable formality and complexity, then that style picks and chooses when to appear and isn't consistent for Jimin. The same applies to Jungkook.

But I overall like the dialogue and think it's good for the story, especially Yoongi's dialogue.

Worldbuilding: 10/10. The worldbuilding throughout the story is intriguing and makes sense considering they're college students. As a college student myself, a lot of the places they went and parts of their schedule were things I myself go to and do, so it was cool to see an accurate representation of college and the different things college students do. I'm not in the music department, but I'm always in the music building since I'm in fine arts, so I really liked the inclusion of the production booths since I walk by them at my school all the time. The environments matter to the characters, and that makes sense considering Yoongi is constantly scanning his environments to see if Chul is waiting for him in the shadows. Overall, the worldbuilding is strong and deserves the best score. No criticisms.

Grammar/Spelling: 8.5/10. The grammar and spelling throughout the story is strong and consistent. There are very few noticeable mistakes. The English style is consistent. Overall, the grammar/spelling is very good and I only have two minor critiques.

There are occasional tense issues where you slip into present tense incorrectly. It doesn't happen too often, but it happened enough that I noticed it. It's not a big deal since it was occasional, but still worth mentioning.

I mentioned the word "that" in the creativity section and how it's a filler word. Sometimes you used it in a way that made the sentences awkward. For example, from chapter nine: It sounded so violent, that it was obvious that it wasn't just Yoongi getting beat up; that the apartment was being absolutely torn apart.

If you read that out loud, you'll see it sounds a little awkward and clunky. What I'd recommend: It sounded so violent it was obvious it wasn't just Yoongi getting beat up; the apartment was being torn apart.

I removed all of the uses of "that" and removed the comma error. If you read it out loud without the that's, you'll see it flows far stronger. Your grammar is good, so I don't think you need a grammar editing software, but I would recommend plugging sentences into TTS generators to have them read back to you. I personally use TTS and it's helped me spot awkward sentences.

The grammar/spelling is otherwise very good.

Description: 7.5/10. The descriptions throughout the story are good. They aren't over-the-top but also aren't too vague. The environments are given weight and feel like they matter, and I think that makes sense considering Yoongi is constantly scanning his surroundings, so details about said environment are important and given that weight. Along with that, character emotion is described well, as are the appearances of the characters. Overall, the descriptions are good and I only have a few critiques.

I'll mention conciseness again in the blurb, but be careful with adding extra words and using passive voice unnecessarily. For example, from chapter 3: "And though Jungkook knew that Jimin and their other fellow dancer, Hoseok, were close, Hoseok seemed to be somewhat oblivious to Jimin's demeanor that day." What I'd recommend: "And though Jungkook knew Jimin and Hoseok were close, Hoseok seemed oblivious to Jimin's demeanor that day." I removed a lot from that sentence for a few reasons. One, more active language. Two, you already established that Hoseok is a dancer and Jimin's close friend earlier, so there's no need to repeat it. If you really want to include it, maybe just fellow dancer, Hoseok, were close, but I don't think you need the "their other" in there. It makes the sentence a bit easier to read when you remove the unnecessary words and the "to be" verb. Or take this example: "He supposed that did make sense." Consider making it more active like this: "He supposed that made sense." Small change, but it makes the language more active and engaging.

You could also benefit from diversifying Yoongi's behavior. I think you did a great job showing him scanning his environments and always looking over his shoulder, so that's not what this is about. It's more about how he always has a nervous laugh or nervous look in his eyes. Instead of telling us that, consider showing it. Maybe his laugh is scratchy and he pulls at his collar while doing it, maybe he can't maintain eye contact (he does this, though what I'm recommending is instead of saying nervous looks in his eyes, consider implementing more showing over telling for that), maybe his laugh cuts off abruptly, maybe his laugh has a little hiccup in it, etc. Just a few ways to show the laugh is nervous instead of telling us that it is.

Themes and Emotions: 8/10. The themes and emotions are the focus of this narrative seeing as it revolves around the fracturing mentality of an ab/se victim. Yoongi is the emotional center, but the boys all get their own emotional journeys as well, sporting a core trait or two that conflicts with their emotions, such as Jin being the "leader" type where he steps up when the other boys are scared, or Jimin being so conscious of everyone's feelings that he ends up being his own downfall. So the emotions and themes are very good throughout the narrative because they have clear focus and are tonally consistent.

My criticisms are the same things I've said before about adverbs, considering diversifying the behavior more, and toning down how many shown ab/se scenes there are to give chapter 9 more impact and horror. But other than those three things, I think the themes and emotions are strong throughout the entire story.

Title/Blurb/Cover: 6.5/10. The title works for the story and sums up what's going to happen. People have a large hatred for starting sentences with conjunctions, but I honestly think they're overreacting and it's fine to start with conjunctions depending on context. In this context, I like how you started with "But." It implies more emotion and sentiment, giving it more of a pop/flair. No criticisms.

The blurb is overall good. It's a little vague and doesn't give too many specifics about the story, but I think that's fine since the title fills in the gaps. The grammar and spelling is overall good, too. I only have minor recommendations for tightening it a little bit. Here's the blurb:

Min Yoongi might be the toughest person any of his friends had ever met.

But Min Yoongi has a secret.

It's one that he can't share with any of his friends, because they simply wouldn't understand. And there's nothing they could do for him. He isn't entirely sure he'd want them to do anything anyway.

Min Yoongi is in a dangerous situation. And he has to handle it alone.

What I'd recommend:

Min Yoongi might be the toughest person his friends had ever met.

But Min Yoongi has a secret.

He can't share it with his friends because they wouldn't understand. And there's nothing they could do for him. He isn't entirely sure he'd want them to do anything anyway.

Min Yoongi is in a dangerous situation. And he has to handle it alone.

The main change I made was to the sharing sentence. I rearranged it to make the sentence more active and concise, and also to remove the unnecessary adverb "simply." I removed both of the "any of" phrases since I felt they weren't necessary. Lastly, I removed the comma before the "because" since it isn't needed.

But other than those few conciseness suggestions, I think the blurb is good.

The cover is a little clunky. Jungkook in particular is clunky. His face looks cut off on the side, and the lighting on both him and Yoongi feels off for the otherwise dark tone of the cover. They don't look like they belong in the scene, if that makes sense. The cover is dark and mysterious, but they're bright with a lot of white light on them. The background image is cool, though I think there could be darker pics of Yoonkook out there to better fit in with the cover.

I also think the font is a little off and should be played around with. I don't feel it fits the genre or subject matter in the story, and I also don't think it fits in with the background image. It feels like the three core elements (the background image, font, and Yoonkook) are contrasting each other and almost like each individual element was meant for a different cover but ended up all in one. I think that's the best way I can describe it. I want to see the background image because I think it's cool, so I think you don't need the Yoonkook at all and you can go with just the background image and a different font. So those are a few suggestions, but I encourage you to play around with it and find what works best for you!

Total: 80.5/100.

Honorable Mention

Lies My Hyung Told Me. by SSears90

Congratulations on an honorable mention!

Review:

Characters: 6.5/10. I like the idea of the characters and what they represent. Yoonkook are like the representation of a family on the verge of collapse. A found family. Yoongi found BTS and discovered there's a life outside of his shady past, leading to a strong desire to protect them from anything and everything. I like the idea of that and the overall execution, especially more toward the end where Yoongi shows his protective side and isn't scared to stand up for BTS. Jungkook is like the angel on his shoulder trying to tell him the right thing to do, but even angels can break, and he does. I think there are many complex themes and emotions weaved through these two characters to make them pull back and forth like oil and water, but eventually, they find a way to mix. It just takes a long time and a journey they'll never forget. In summary, I like them, though I have some critiques about the setup and execution of Yoongi's lie.

My criticism of the characters is that there are very few conversations outside of talking about the plot. I'd say a good 95% of the dialogue is at least somewhat related to the plot. We don't get much chance before the story starts to see the relationship between the characters because we jump almost right into the plot. That's perfectly fine. Jumping into the plot is okay since you want to hook your audience in, but we need character moments, too. From chapter one to chapter eleven, it's almost all plot and no quiet moments between the characters. My biggest criticism that I'll mention again in the plot section is how we were told Yoongi's secret right away. It's the first thing we really learn, and seeing as that's the selling point of the story, I was a bit confused by the purpose of revealing it so soon. It makes it so when Jungkook says "You lied to me," I don't feel much because I don't know anything about the Yoonkook relationship outside of what I know about them in real life, and I also already knew about the secret. I didn't get lied to. I knew from the beginning, so I didn't feel as much as I could have.

But I'm not one to say all this but not provide suggestions, so I have one potential suggestion I'll give here. Maybe switch it so we don't know Yoongi's secret and we instead start in Jungkook's POV. We can start with a scene of Yoongi showing his softer side to Jungkook, and they walk into the meeting together when the bombshell is dropped that the company is bankrupt. Everything proceeds like normal. The boys go home and Jungkook goes to Yoongi for support and opens up about his fears. The two bond, and at the end of the chapter, you can have a cliffhanger where Jungkook spots Yoongi sneaking out in the middle of the night, setting the seeds for suspicion.

From there, you can have Jungkook and Yoongi cooking breakfast or something and you can maybe even show them rationing on food because they're giving all their money to the company. Jungkook talks to Yoongi and doesn't mention what he saw but pokes around to find information, like asking Yoongi how he slept, then maybe even saying Jungkook was worried because the door got left unlocked last night (this could be a lie or the truth, either one works), and Yoongi denies everything and says he slept well. However, Yoongi's tiredness is obvious because he makes basic mistakes while cooking and rubs his eyes to show he didn't sleep. Maybe he's wearing makeup around the dorm to hide his eye bags. Jungkook doesn't push because he desperately wants to believe his hyung. That night, Jungkook watches Yoongi leave again but doesn't follow him, instead waiting in the living room to confront him when he gets back. When he gets back, you can have the girlfriend conversation, and Jungkook can get suspicious but eventually backs off. In his mind, it's to the point where he convinces himself Yoongi is fine and innocent because he can't handle the idea of Yoongi lying to him.

The next day, maybe have another one of the members be suspicious of Yoongi. Maybe Hoseok since Yoongi and Hoseok are two peas in a pod. Hoseok talks to Jungkook about it, and Jungkook gets defensive, claiming Yoongi wouldn't lie to them. It's obvious at this point that he's fed up in his delusion that Yoongi is innocent and nothing's wrong. Jungkook absolutely cannot accept the idea that their friend is lying to them, and it drives him nearly crazy. That night, Jungkook is desperate for answers and follows Yoongi. Then, bam. The same confrontation. So the story is very similar this way, but there are three core changes: 1) Yoonkook have more scenes to have heartfelt conversations with one another before the lie, leading to a stronger reason for readers to care about the Yoonkook relationship; 2) readers don't know Yoongi's secret, leading to higher engagement because we too want to figure out what it is Yoongi's doing; 3) one of the other boys is suspicious, which would give them more stake in the plot and give you a chance to flesh them out more, thus adding to the readers' fears when the antagonists threaten all of BTS' lives.

So, to summarize, my suggestion would be to give us more conversations outside of the plot. Most of the conversations are talking about the plot, but it's hard to connect with the characters when it's all plot and we're not given a chance to see why we should care about the Yoonkook here. Most of the reason we care is because of our real life knowledge, but we need knowledge within the book, which is why I'm focusing so much on this. With all that being said, that's just one suggestion and not at all what I'm saying you should go with as it's your style, so this idea may not fit in with your style, but I hope it at least gives a new perspective that's helpful for future stories!

I overall like Yoonkook as a concept and I think they were executed well, all I recommend is giving us that first initial push to get us to care about this book's Yoonkook, and also giving us more dialogue not related to the plot. I hope that makes sense.

Plot: 6.5/10. The plot is interesting and unique. I've seen a lot of criminal BTS stories where one or all of them are criminals, and the plot normally rolls out pretty similarly. However, in this story, Yoongi has a bad past where he fell to crime, and you can't help but feel bad for him. The problem with many of these BTS crime fics is that the authors try to make them sympathetic, but it falls flat either because the boys went too far or it's just kinda ridiculous. This story doesn't have either of those problems and instead makes Yoongi genuinely sympathetic because you know what he's doing is for the greater good. At least, that's what he thinks. He isn't doing it for a selfish reason like BTS later claim he is. He just wanted to make sure everyone got to keep their jobs and they could continue making music to inspire millions of people. If anything, that's the most selfless thing he could do, he just didn't go about it in the right way, and that's good for the plot since it gives the readers an interesting dilemma: is Yoongi right, or are BTS right? I'd argue there's no answer and they're both in the wrong for what they've done, but at the end of the day, they're still family who want to stick by one another's sides. So in that sense, I really liked the plot, and I think it did a good job propelling the characters and themes forward.

I only have two critiques about the plot, but they're major, so let's jump into it.

I understand this may just be personal preference, but as I mentioned in the previous section, I wasn't a fan of the choice to reveal Yoongi's secret first thing. It was the main selling point of the story, and I feel hiding it a bit more and having us guess what Yoongi is doing would give us more engagement since we'd be trying to figure it out with Jungkook. Like I said before, maybe you can have it so it's more through Jungkook's eyes as he watches Yoongi's strange behavior and, eventually, follows him and finds out the truth. Then the "You lied to me" is 20x more impactful because Yoongi also lied to the audience, but because we already knew he was a drug dealer, we already knew the truth and didn't feel lied to. That's why I suggest considering for future stories having it so when there's a big secret, maybe consider hiding it from the audience. Even if it's obvious what the secret will be, it still gives the reader more engagement because we're trying to figure it out on our own instead of having it be told to us.

Secondly, and far more importantly, the foundation for the plot could use some reinforcement since, as is, it's hard to believe. I believe we need more information about how the company went bankrupt, and it'd also help to have more clarity about what era BTS is in since I believe the most detail we get is "A few years into their career." Knowing the exact era could help form my opinion here since there's a major difference between 2016 BTS and 2018 BTS, but at the very least it has to be 2016 BTS in order to be considered a few years into their career. I'll get into that later, but this is to say that without explanation, it's hard to believe one employee sank an entire music company. While a few incidents have happened in real life, each time there were detailed explanations as to how since entire companies sinking from one employee is rare, and it also means the employee must have had either an elaborate plan or was an idiot with financial investments. For example, maybe the employee was an agent for BigHit talking a big game, then took the money and was siphoning it elsewhere. If you look into the Barings Bank collapse, you'll see how someone was able to collapse a bank. Granted, even then, this is a music company, that was a bank. For the music company, there are countless ways they can make that money back quickly, so they have more advantages over some of those real life cases. Get BTS to release their unreleased music to gain revenue, have them do performances and use whatever donations you got from the members and other employees to book venues and stuff, even have the BTS members livestream on Twitch and make YouTube videos. That could make them millions in a few months, tops. They might even break Twitch depending on what era of BTS we're talking about, but if it's 2017-2019 BTS, then they could make millions in two or three months. I know that wouldn't be enough to stabilize the entire company long term, but it'd be enough to get them back on their feet. The thing is with BigHit is that they got BTS to debut when they had about enough money to buy a sharpie and an expired banana milk back in 2013, so these guys know how to manage money and are used to financial struggles. That's why this part of the plot needs to be fleshed out more, otherwise the reason Yoongi turns to the drug trade is unconvincing.

I reread parts of the story to ensure I didn't miss anything, and I reread all of chapter 1, but I didn't see an explanation for how the entire company collapsed from one employee outside of one sentence saying there was a scandal. We need to know what scandal and why BigHit is so in the weeds; otherwise, again, the reason Yoongi falls to the drug trade is unrealistic. So it's not that it can't work because, like I said, it has happened in real life a few times, but a few times. It's rare because it's hard for an entire company to collapse because of one person, especially if they're just regular employees and not higher-ups. So that's why I recommend fleshing out the scandal more. Maybe you can pull from real life situations like the bank I mentioned, or maybe it's an agent BigHit trusted for years who's the one who originally recruited BTS, but secretly they've been pocketing a large percentage of the money and siphoning the company's funds elsewhere, leading to a financial collapse.

Overall, the plot is good, it could just use some tweaks to its foundation and consideration to switching the order and not revealing Yoongi's secret right away.

Pacing: 7.5/10. The pacing is strong in the second half of the story since it reveals the plot at a good pace. It's more on the fast-paced side, but there's nothing wrong with that, especially since this is meant to be a short story. You use the runtime well to tell an engaging story and give us a theme-driven narrative. The overall pacing is good.

The criticisms are all the things I mentioned above in the plot and character section about considering slowing down so we could have a stronger understanding of the plot and characters. And when I say slow down, I don't mean you need to add new chapters or thousands upon thousands of words. This could be done just through a couple hundred words here and there or just one new scene. Like in the meeting, add a hundred words explaining the scandal and how it led to bankruptcy. Just one hundred words could make the difference, so I'm not suggesting adding full new chapters or anything of the sort. If anything, that'd probably be pretty counterproductive, so I'm suggesting slowing down but also not to an obnoxious degree, if that makes sense.

Creativity: 7/10. The story idea is focused on Yoonkook as Jungkook figures out Yoongi's lies and goes deeper down a rabbit hole he didn't know existed. In this alternate universe, Yoongi is involved in the drug trade. He was also involved in it in his past, and after a catastrophe at BTS' company, he needs to return to it to gather money to survive. This concept is cool and gets the plot moving in the right direction. A world-famous rapper has to turn to a secret dark past to save what he loves? Cool, I like it. When it comes to the story idea, I think the creativity is very strong, and it's overall executed in a creative way. My critiques have to do with word choice and exclamation marks.

Be careful with exclamation marks. One of my old English teachers said exclamation marks should only be used for situations like "I'm pregnant!" which I think is good advice. Exclamation marks are emphasis marks, so the more you use them, the less impact they have later. That's why I suggest downsizing whenever possible, like that scene in chapter 3 between Yoonkook where JK confronts him about sneaking out. I feel 90% of the exclamation marks in that scene weren't needed. Exclamation marks are also telling over showing, so the more you use them, the more telling over showing you're doing, too.

My main suggestion is to use less adverbs since you have an overreliance on them. For example, in chapter 5, you use 35 adverbs, and the chapter is only a little more than five minutes long. Adverbs are telling over showing, so anywhere you can cut down on the unnecessary ones is recommended. You don't have to get rid of all adverbs, but many adverbs like "suddenly" and "immediately" can be removed or changed into a more active sentence. It's more the -ly adverbs, but you also sometimes overuse "just." Consider the 300 advice. This advice says that you should have no more than one adverb per 300 words. You can break this rule if you have a good reason for it, so it's not a hard set rule, but it's worth trying out! You can fix adverbs by either removing them or rewording sentences. Let's say your sentence is "They immediately talked." You can instead say, "They dove into a conversation." It's more active, removes the adverb, and says the same thing in a more descriptive way, and it only added two words. Small changes go a long way.

Along with that, some of the adverbs lead into an overused word problem. Be careful not to use the same words over and over, like "immediately" is a word you repeated often, and I would suggest downsizing on how many times you used it.

Otherwise, the creativity is good.

Dialogue: 7.5/10. Dialogue tags are mostly done correctly, so yay! You get a warm cookie for that. The dialogue itself is good and works for what you're trying to do for the story. The only critiques I have are about presentation.

The only times tags were incorrect were the occasional (maybe 1-3 times per chapter) times you capitalized tags after special punctuation (! and ?). Like this: "And him?" He asked Jin. Should be: "And him?" he asked Jin. It wasn't too often, so I won't take off as much as I normally would for dialogue tags.

Just a minor thing, but sometimes you have incorrect punctuation in the dialogue where you don't use commas to split off non-vital information to the sentence. It's a little inconsistent where sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. For example, from chapter 5: "Come on hyung." Should be: "Come on, hyung." Whenever there's names or titles like that in dialogue and it's not essential info to the sentence, it should be blocked off by a comma to show that. Hyung is supplementary info that doesn't change the meaning of "Come on," therefore making it non-vital info. It's absolutely fine to have non-vital info in your sentences, though if you do, make sure the commas are consistent.

Lastly, and most importantly, I would suggest never using actions as tags. I'm talking words like whimpered, whined, hissed, chuckled, smiled, etc., any action words, really. This is because they're unnatural to use as tags. I would also argue "cried" as a tag is unnatural, though to each their own and that's just my personal opinion. I say this because dialogue tags tag dialogue, not people. That means if you say "he chuckled" as a tag, it's implying the words are chuckling, not the person. You can say words, but you can't chuckle them. You can chuckle while speaking, but words themselves can't chuckle. Luckily, there's a very simple fix to this. You can do a couple of things. Like this:

He chuckled. "*Insert line here*."

"*Insert line here*," he said with a chuckle.

Those are two alternatives, but I encourage you to play around with it and find what works for you!

The dialogue is overall good, and the tags are mostly done correctly, so you get bonus points and a ticket of appreciation from me for that.

Worldbuilding: 7.5/10. There are many aspects of the worldbuilding I like, with the drug trade and Yoongi's past being my favorite part. I like how we get shown more about what Yoongi does and why it's so important that it stays secret. I've watched enough Breaking Bad to know crime pays well, and that's reinforced here to the point where you honestly can't blame Yoongi for doing what he's doing. It's wrong, obviously, but that doesn't mean you can't get behind what he's doing. So when it came to Yoongi's side of the world, I really liked it!

My critiques are the same as what I mentioned in the plot section: what era are we in? There isn't much hint at what the boys are doing musically during this time of need when I feel that's the time they should have all hands on deck and releasing their unreleased songs just to attempt to help BigHit. That's why specifying the era and showing more of what state BTS is in is important and what I recommend. My opinion about the plot sways depending on if this is 2016 BTS or 2018 BTS, but I can't tell based on the narrative unless there's something I missed. Like I said earlier, I reread multiple chapters just to ensure I didn't miss anything, so if I did, I would suggest making it more clear since it would have had to slip by multiple rereads and my initial read of all chapters. So, to summarize, I'd recommend more specifics about the era BTS is in and making it more impactful to the story since I imagine what they're doing with their music impacts the company's financial situation, and also fleshing out how the company fell more.

Grammar/Spelling: 8.5/10. The grammar and spelling is overall good throughout the entire story, and there aren't many errors. I only have a few suggestions regarding punctuation.

There were times you A) had missing commas and/or B) used commas when you needed different punctuation. For example, from chapter 5: Yoongi groaned, he had quite a headache at this point. The comma needs to be a semicolon.

Similarly, from chapter 8: Although he didn't know what to do about those two, he knew one thing was for certain, he wasn't going back to that life. The second comma needs to be a colon, like this: Although he didn't know what to do about those two, he knew one thing was for certain: he wasn't going back to that life.

Example of a missing comma: Yoongi didn't care to continue the conversation and he turned around and began walking away.

You can do one of two things here. One: Yoongi didn't care to continue the conversation, and he turned around and began walking away. Two: Yoongi didn't care to continue the conversation and turned around and began walking away. Removing the "he" would make it a compound predicate sentence, so you wouldn't need the comma.

Other than the punctuation errors, the spelling and grammar were very good.

Description: 7/10. The descriptions throughout the story were good and serviced the narrative. They showed us the environments, the characters' facial expressions and body language, the plot events like the car crash, etc. Nothing felt vague in that sense, so I think the descriptions are overall good and do what they need to to elevate the story. They also don't overstay their welcome or ever risk becoming purple prose, so that's another good thing. I only have a few suggestions.

Be careful with passive voice and making the sentences not active. There were times throughout the story where you had a lot of passive voice and I felt you didn't need it. For example, from chapter 5: "He could feel himself start shaking." I recommend: "He felt himself shaking." Or if you want to be more specific, you can do something like this: "His fingers shook as he raised them to his mouth to bite his nails." I'm not saying that's a good alternative or something to go with since there's nothing wrong with "He felt himself shaking," though if you wanted to get more specific with your descriptions, that's one way to do so. There's also this: "His head was pounding." You can shorten it to "His head pounded." It's shorter and more active, therefore making it a little more engaging.

Moving away from that, my main critique of the descriptions is the same thing I've mentioned in past reviews: telling over showing. There's an abundance of telling over showing in the narrative. For example, from chapter 8: He was nervous about how Jungkook would react. Throughout a lot of chapter 8, there's telling over showing to tell us when Yoongi's nervous, when Jungkook's angry, when they're sad, etc. There's nothing wrong with telling over showing at times, though be careful not to overdo it, especially with emotions like sadness, anger, and nervousness, where there are countless ways to show said emotions instead of telling them. A lot of this are things I've said before in past reviews, though for an emotional story like this, I think it's even more important to have more showing over telling since that's how you're going to get readers even more immersed in the emotions.

There's also the topic of the adverbs, but since I already explained that earlier, I won't talk your ear off again here. I hope all those suggestions made sense.

Themes and Emotions: 7.5/10. The themes and emotions throughout the narrative are overall good and do a good job showing the dangers of hiding secrets from your family, but also the implications of shunning family instead of trying to understand their POV. There are many different themes and emotions at work in the book, and I think they blended together well and did a good job personifying themselves through the Yoonkook dynamic.

My critiques are the same as other categories, mostly with the telling over showing and giving more weight to the Yoonkook relationship so the emotions have more of a gut punch, if that makes sense. Those are my two main suggestions, and since I already went into detail about them earlier, I won't go into detail again; however, if you have any questions, I am happy to answer them.

Title/Blurb/Cover: 7.5/10. The title tells us what the story is about, though it is a little long. I have no problem with long titles, though I feel it could be shortened to something along the lines of Hyung's Lies, Hyung's Betrayal, Hyung's Hidden Truths, etc. They're all a little shorter, though if you have a specific purpose in mind with the "Told Me" part of the title, I think it works fine. Overall, the title works, but if you ever want to play around with it, I encourage you to do so.

The blurb is short and to the point. It's a short story, so that makes sense, and the title also clues the readers in on whatever they need filled in that the blurb doesn't provide. Grammatically, it looks pretty good and I didn't notice any spelling errors. My grammar checkers agree. For that reason, I have no criticisms of the blurb.

The cover works well enough, though it is a little plain and could have a bit more flair to it. The font in particular doesn't stand out much to me, and considering this is a dark story, I feel you could play around with a darker cover expressing the mature themes inside, and that includes the font. Consider playing around with the font in particular to give it more of that heartache feel. Maybe an elegant font, or a cursive one, or one that's thin and fading away. Those are just a couple of ideas, but I encourage you to play around with it!

Total: 73/100.

Honorable Mention

Golden by cj_parkjennykim

Congratulations on an honorable mention!

Review:

Characters: 8.5/10. Jungkook and Y/n are the two main characters in the story, and I think they work and carry the narrative well. They clearly have a strong reason to want to be together. I liked the dynamic between them and how Jungkook worried about Y/n. At first, I wasn't sure how to feel about Y/n, but as time went on, I understood her feelings and why she felt trapped and wanted Jungkook but knew she couldn't have him due to familial pressures (along with the financial differences, of course). So, overall, the characters are good.

I only have two relatively minor criticisms, and the first one will be fleshed out more in the pacing section. Sometimes it felt hard to connect with the characters because the POVs switched so quickly, especially in the beginning of the story where we're first getting to know the characters. Before we get invested in a character's POV, it switches, meaning we now have to adjust to an entirely different POV. Then by the time we adjust to that, it switches again. But I'll talk a little more about this in the pacing section.

The second criticism I have is Heesung feels very underdeveloped. Considering he got a POV in the first chapter, I was expecting to see more POVs from him, but I don't think he got another POV after that, so I was a bit confused with the purpose of his first POV if we never returned to that. He's built up to be this really bad guy who's impossible to get away from, but he kinda goes away pretty easily in the last chapter because Jungkook has money and buys his way out of it. It's not that I'm against this idea, but I was expecting to see more of Heesung, almost like he was a shadow following Jungkook and Y/n around. Like even though he isn't physically there, he's still there, if that makes sense. He went away rather easily, and while I'm happy for Y/n because she deserved to get away, I was surprised there weren't any further Heesung POVs despite us getting one in the prologue. It's not a big deal since the focus is on Y/n and Jungkook, but it's still something worth mentioning.

Other than those two things, the characters are good.

Plot: 7.5/10. The overall plot is simple and to the point, which is good since it gives more emphasis on the characters and themes, which are the focus of the story. The plot is Y/n trying to get out of her ab/sive relationship but being unable to do so due to familial pressures. It's a good plot that isn't too plot-heavy and is more focused on the characters, as it should be for a narrative like this. The plot is overall good.

The prologue isn't a prologue, so I would suggest changing the name of it. A prologue and first chapter are very different, and your prologue isn't a proper prologue. The pro in prologue implies past, so most prologues tend to be in the past and not including the main characters. Not always, but that's the standard when it comes to prologue writing. Or the main characters will be there but in their younger forms, but typically the main characters aren't even there at all. There's nothing that separates the prologue here from the first chapter. In fact, the prologue and first chapter happen within a few seconds of each other, so there's no time difference at all. That's why I suggest renaming it since it isn't a prologue.

Also, be careful with tone. In the Closer To You chapter, there's this: "Oh dear cheese crackers." Funny and out of pocket, but extremely misplaced. She just got r/ped last chapter, and there were three paragraphs in a row describing her misery, and now she's in a bad situation where Jungkook is going to be on the way to her house. This comedic moment felt very out of place considering the overall tone of the story is depressing and she just got r/ped. Since this is such a dark subject matter, I'd suggest limiting humor in serious situations and focusing on the dark subject matter.

The last thing I'll mention is there were some pacing issues, though I'll cover that in the next section. Since it doesn't impact the plot that much but rather the characters, I won't deduct much from plot for the pacing.

The plot is otherwise good and I think it was a good decision to keep the focus on the characters/themes.

Pacing: 7.5/10. The pacing is good and reveals plot and character information at a good rate. The story doesn't feel too slow or too fast other than the POV switches that I'll cover in a minute. Overall, the pacing is good and moves along at a steady rate that wasn't overwhelming or underwhelming.

I wasn't a big fan of the choice to rapidly switch POVs to the point where POVs would switch mid-conversation. It got really hard to follow and it made me question why not write this in third-person omniscient if you want to jump between the POVs? It'd probably be far smoother to write in the omniscient POV instead of jumping back and forth constantly mid-conversation. It made it hard to invest in one character because by the time we're fully immersed in their POV, we're jumping to another POV. Like jumping from Y/n and Jungkook and then there's one Heesung POV in the prologue, which felt very random, in my opinion. Like I said in the plot section, the prologue isn't a prologue, but if you made Heesung's POV the prologue, that could work as a prologue since it's setting up backdrop information for the story. It'd still be debatable if it's a proper prologue or not, but it'd definitely be more along the lines of one.

Secondly, some of the later parts of the story got a bit repetitive for me. Please Don't Change, Hate You, Somebody, and Shot Glass all felt like they covered a similar topic in slightly different ways and like a lot of them could have been combined or trimmed to move the story along faster. I like the idea of them individually. Like as individual chapters, they work. But altogether, they got a bit repetitive and I felt you could have combined them or trimmed them to get moving to the wedding a bit faster, if that makes sense.

The pacing is overall good.

Creativity: 7.5/10. I really like the idea to take Jungkook's album and integrate it into this story. I think you added more layers to the album and raised many good points about the emotions. I loved the integration of Hate You since it made so much sense in the story's context. I always loved the idea of taking music and writing stories about it, and I'm glad you did it here. I mean, c'mon people reading this, just look at this story idea: A broken love story separated by an ab/ser all presented to us through the lens of a real life album. C'mon, that's sick. The sentence structure was also unique and had diversity in it. I only have two suggestions, both about word choice.

Be careful with word choice. Words like "body," "walk," and "cascade" were sometimes repeated. For example, in Euphoria, "cascade" is repeated twice in the same paragraph. In general, I would suggest very rarely using cascade. I understand this is anecdotal and not based on any facts, but based on how many reviews I've done, one of the most common words I see is "cascade" to the point where it feels cliche for me nowadays and I can't take it seriously when I see it. Since it's used so often, I'd suggest limiting how many times you use it.

I'm not going to give you the full adverb talk since we've talked about them before, though I will say here that there were too many adverbs throughout the story and I'd recommend cutting down on them. I won't go into detail since I've waggled my finger and went in detail about them with you before, but just know that's another area where the deductions came from. That's the main deduction in the category since there were frequent adverbs.

The overall creativity was good.

Dialogue: 7.5/10. The dialogue is overall effective for the story and matches with the character personalities. It overall flows well and makes sense for the scenes that are happening. The dialogue is good, and my suggestions are all about the presentation/grammar of the lines.

Dialogue tags are done incorrectly, though I don't think I need to go too much into detail here since we've had quite a few dialogue tag talks before. Still, for sake of the review, I will say dialogue tags are always lowercase unless they are proper nouns, and dialogue needs to end with anything other than a period/full stop when you're using a tag after the dialogue. Just some examples of correct tags:

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Where were you!" he shouted.

"I missed you," he said.

So those are some examples, but I won't go too into detail since we've talked about it before.

I'll go over this in grammar/spelling, though you consistently don't use punctuation for non-vital information like "Are you okay Jungkook?" where you would need to write "Are you okay, Jungkook?" But I'll go over this in grammar/spelling. I just thought I'd mention it here because it happens almost exclusively in dialogue. It's a minor thing, but still worth mentioning since they're frequent punctuation errors.

The dialogue is overall okay and does what it needs to to elevate the story and get it moving in the direction it needs to go.

Worldbuilding: 7/10. In terms of the environments, I think the apartments and wedding venue are interesting set pieces that reflect the emotions of the characters. So the environments are done well and make sense for the types of scenes you're writing.

My main critique is the world feels very general, and it's hard to pinpoint exactly where they are or if the location matters to the story. This story doesn't need a crazy detailed world or anything, though establishing more about Heesung and the laws could be beneficial since, like I said earlier, Heesung is out of the picture rather quickly. Knowing more about the legal proceedings of the country they're in, more about how the evidence came about, and how powerful money is in their country (i.e., how deep does it go and how many bribes can Jungkook truly make before he gets caught too) could be beneficial since that's dealing with the main villain of the story. So any additional details we can get without the narrative feeling bloated and any specific locations/customs/cultures could be interesting to see. I assume this is in South Korea considering the types of alcohol they're drinking, but that's one of the only if not the only indicator I saw about the location, so it could be interesting to see more. I'm also going to mention being careful with overdoing it with descriptions later since that can make it hard to pinpoint what's happening at times, though I already wrote a very detailed explanation in the description section, so I'll wait until there to explain this point.

Grammar/Spelling: 6.5/10. The grammar and spelling is overall good, I just have some suggestions to improve them.

There were some spelling errors throughout the story, though they weren't too noticeable but still worth mentioning. I'll provide two examples later in the descriptions section.

There are punctuation errors, like this: He smelled so alluring and seductive, it made me feel even more intoxicated than the alcohol in my system. The comma needs to be a semicolon. This is a consistent error where you'll have commas in place of semicolons. I recommend rewording the sentences to include more conjunctions and areas for commas since I'm personally against using too many semicolons, though if you want to use the semicolons, that's fine too since it's your style and your decision.

There are other punctuation errors where you won't close off non-vital information to a sentence with a comma. That was a mouthful, so I'll explain with an example: "And all he did was gaslight and abuse you Y/n." There needs to be a comma after "you" and before "Y/n" since Y/n is non-vital information to the sentence. I'm sure you've seen in Starfield that it's not: "I miss you honey" but rather "I miss you, honey." That's because the "honey" isn't important to the sentence. It's supplementary information. Jimin's just calling her a cute name. Jungkook's just calling her Y/n. Since it has no impact to the meaning of the core sentence, you can close it off with a comma. That's why it's "Yes, sir" and not "Yes sir" despite the sentence being so short. The "sir" is still non-vital info. It's fine to use names and non-vital info of course, but when you do, make sure you're including commas to show they don't impact the core meaning of the sentence.

There are tense issues where you flip flop between past and present tense incorrectly. The issues weren't too consistent but still noticeable where sometimes you slipped into present tense incorrectly, so make sure you're staying in past tense consistently except for the exceptions where you can use present tense in past tense.

Lastly, there are some preposition errors where you'll use the wrong preposition. For example: Instead of the soft beautiful locks on my head sat a matted mess, the bags in my eyes darker than ever, the sparkle in them lost.

I would suggest "under" instead of "in" for the "the bags in my eyes" part since bags can't really be in your eyes. They're under your eyes, so that's why I'd suggest that.

The grammar and spelling is overall good throughout the story, it could just use some of those tweaks.

Description: 7/10. I appreciate that you tried to do more with your descriptions by incorporating the five senses and making the character emotions more complex. I always encourage writers to play around with the five senses since it helps readers immerse themselves in the scene, and it's also fun to read and see how much detail goes into the descriptions. I overall like the descriptions and think they work for the story, though I have some suggestions.

Be careful with putting too much description into one sentence. I say this because sometimes you're overstuffing your descriptions to the point where you have syntax errors and incomplete sentences. It feels like you started writing sentences one way then got lost in doing description, leading to the sentence feeling incomplete or you forgetting how the sentence started.

So you don't have to play musical chapters, let's take two examples from the prologue:

Before he could find me staring at his sharp jaw-line, perfect doe eyes which were slightly fazed looking from all the alcohol, but still hadn't lot their sparkle, and the way he had an elbow resting on his right knee from our position on the floor in front of the couch, strong thighs visible due to the black and white adidas shorts he was wearing, I looked away.

If you read that out loud, you'll hear how clunky it sounds. There's just way too much happening there, and I strongly recommend downsizing. You also don't have to describe everything at once. You can take one or two of those things, then save the rest for later. There are also two spelling errors there with Adidas being lowercase and lost being spelled as lot. That's one example of what I mean when I say it feels like you were getting lost in the description and lost what the sentence was supposed to mean. So for that sentence in particular, I recommend downsizing. Let's look at another example, this time of a sentence that feels incomplete/like it's missing something:

Jungkook's fruity and musky scent as he leaned over me to grab the remote which was on my left, fingers ever so delicately and accidentally brushing against my knee as he did so.

If you read that out loud, you'll see the "Jungkook's fruity and musky scent" goes nowhere. It's incomplete. There's no pay off for that set up. What is the scent doing? That's a syntax error, hence why I'm recommending reading more descriptions out loud and slowing down while writing them to make sure the sentences connect. A simple fix could be to have a pay off for it before the "as," like "Jungkook's fruity and musky scent filled the air as he...". That simple fix makes the sentence complete. I'm not saying that's what you should do since I just pulled that out of my fat redheaded a$$ in two seconds, but it's an example of one way you can take the sentence. There are plenty of ways to write this sentence, so I encourage you to play around with it.

I overall like the descriptions, I just suggest making sure they don't go on too long or go too over-the-top, if that makes sense.

Themes and Emotions: 7.5/10. I already went over how I like the use of real life music in this story and how it intertwines with the themes. Every song is given its own theme, in a way (in terms of the story and how it presents them). I think you do a good job with that creative idea and spin it to make good themes and emotions. The emotional complexity of ab/se is handled well and makes sense.

The only criticisms I have are things I've said before, so I won't go too into detail, like adverbs, being careful with descriptions, being careful with tone, and being careful with pacing. So those are where the deductions come from, but since I already covered them in detail earlier, I'll just mention them here again without detail.

Title/Blurb/Cover: 6.5/10. The title is fine for the story. It's Jungkook's album, so that's fine considering it's a Jungkook story. It doesn't have the best headline/SEO score since it's short and doesn't give much detail about the story, but I think it's fine. Maybe if you want to play around with it and find something that gives more info about the story you could, but I honestly think the title fits in with the fact that it's a Jungkook fic, so no criticisms in that regard.

There is no blurb, so I cannot judge this category. There's only a quote and content warnings, which does not count as a blurb, therefore I must deduct points accordingly. I would suggest incorporating a blurb to give readers more info about what the story will be about. Like I mentioned above, the title doesn't give much away, so to then have no blurb means readers are literally going in blind. That's why I'd suggest having a paragraph or a few paragraphs describing the story to give readers the necessary info to make them want to click on the book. If anything, the quote is extremely misleading and gives the impression the story has the opposite tone, which is another reason why I suggest having a short description to give readers an idea about the story. This is a story about ab/se, so to have a sexual reference as the quote is why it's misleading.

The cover is clear, especially for Wattpad standards since Wattpad likes to play ctrl alt blur with covers. It's a nice picture and I think the cover overall works well for the story. No criticisms.

Total: 73/100.

REVIEWS:

Parth Probodhika: Pristine hues of his peace by dwarkaratna

Review:

Characters: 7.5/10. The characters are good and fit in well with the romance genre. They're very loving people who have nice banter, making their character dynamics fun to read about. I think you overall did a good job with the characters and made them unique from one another. I liked Arjun in particular, but all of the characters were entertaining.

The main criticism I have is it's often hard to follow what the characters are feeling because you often tell us what they're feeling, not giving us time to feel it for ourselves through showing over telling methods. For example, if a character is happy, you tell us directly that they're happy or that happiness is sparkling in their eyes. I'll talk more about this later.

Another main criticism I have is the grammar makes it hard to understand the emotions and dialogue. I'll get into it more in the dialogue and grammar sections, but many of the sentences were awkward and could use some tweaks to make them more fluid. But again, I'll explain those things in their respective categories.

Plot: 10/10. The plot and ending make sense for the story and were presented to the readers at an even pace. I didn't notice any plot holes or inconsistencies. For that reason, I have no criticisms. The plot is overall good and deserving of the perfect score.

Pacing: 8/10. Throughout the story, the pacing is good. The chapters aren't too long or too short and they wrap up well. The ending is paced well, too. Overall, the pacing works and reveals plot and character information at a good rate.

I have two criticisms. One is that it takes a long time to get to chapter 1. I thought pieces of the past was the first chapter, then I realized it wasn't after reading through those intro chaps. In total, there are eleven chapters before chapter 1. That is way too much, and I suggest condensing it as much as possible. Maybe move the achievements to the end and combine all three character chapters into one. Now you remove six chapters from the beginning, making it only five chapters before the first official chapter. That's still too many, but at least it's not into the double digits. I'm only saying this because many of the chapters before chapter 1 look essential to understanding the story, so readers will click on them and might even get lost wondering where the story starts, which is why I'm suggesting downsizing as much as possible.

The second criticism that I'll mention again in the worldbuilding is those first few intro chapters have a lot of exposition about the world. It's a lot of info-dumping that's hard to keep up with as a first time reader, making the pacing feel really slow in the beginning.

Other than those two things, the pacing is good.

Creativity: 8/10. The creativity in the story is overall good. The story idea fits the genre and characters. While I have major criticisms for the grammar, the sentence structure is different and doesn't feel repetitive. I only have a critique for the word choice and adverbs.

Be careful with overusing certain words since there were times you overused words like "softly." When you use adverbs, "softly" is one of your go-to ones where it feels that's the one you'll use when you want to use an adverb. That's why I suggest limiting how often you say a word like softly and also consider cutting down on some adverbs. You don't use too many, though considering the chapters tend to be around 4 minutes long, there were times you used 15+ adverbs in a single chapter, so consider cutting down on the adverbs at times. The reason is because adverbs are telling over showing, so the more you use them, the more telling over showing you're doing.

Otherwise, the creativity is good.

Dialogue: 6/10. The dialogue is overall fine and does what it needs to for the story, though I have a few suggestions to help with the emotions presented in the dialogue.

Due to the grammar, the dialogue is a bit awkward at times and doesn't make sense. For example: "Should I say yes for this? It could be better." The first sentence is the problem. It would sound far more natural to say this: "Should I say yes?" The "for this" makes the sentence awkward and hard to understand.

You do this thing where you'll have a comma at the end of dialogue even though a tag doesn't follow it. From chapter 51: "Time flies so fast," This statement sounds in a dual way...

The comma is wrong there and it should be a full stop, so this: "Time flies so fast." Whenever you're not using a tag, make sure the dialogue has proper end punctuation, which wouldn't be a comma. It's normally a comma if you're using a tag, but since you aren't using a tag in that case, a period/full stop is necessary.

This is an example of an awkward sentence, too, but I'll get more into that in the grammar section. What I mean by awkward is what is "sounds in a dual way" supposed to mean? I think you're phrasing it wrong and meant to say something like this: "Time flies so fast." This statement is either pleasant or painful. Or maybe: "Time flies so fast." This statement has two meanings: pleasure or pain. Or maybe even: "Time flies so fast." This statement has dual meanings: pleasure or pain. But saying "sounds in a dual way" doesn't make sense and makes the sentence awkward. But again, I'll get more into the grammar two sections from now, but I just thought I'd bring that up here as a precursor to it.

Lastly, dialogue tags are done incorrectly. You often do tags like this: "What kind of sensation, Subhi?" He asked (chap 38).

It should be: "What kind of sensation, Subhi?" he asked.

Since dialogue tags are continuations of the sentences, they need to be lowercase unless they are a proper noun. Here are a few examples of proper tags:

"How are you?" he asked.

"Where were you!" he shouted.

"I missed you," he said.

"Are you okay?" Jungkook asked.

Only "Jungkook" is capitalized because it is a name and therefore a proper noun. The pronouns (he) are not proper nouns, therefore they're lowercase. Tags are in the same sentence as the dialogue, so that's why they're lowercase unless they're proper nouns.

So the dialogue is overall fine, it could just use some tweaks to the grammar and presentation.

Worldbuilding: 9/10. The world is overall colorful and makes sense for the story idea and characters. There are many cool worldbuilding elements and details sprinkled throughout.

The only point off is from what I mentioned earlier about there being heavy exposition in the beginning that could have been spaced out more throughout the story since the beginning is your hook, so to have most of it be exposition about the world was a bit hard to keep up with. Readers want to know what the immediate situation is. There's time to flesh out the world and characters later, but figuring out the conflict and what the story is going to be about is first and foremost. That's why, for future books, I suggest spacing out the exposition more to give readers more time to adjust to what's currently happening in the story.

Otherwise, the worldbuilding is good.

Grammar/Spelling: 4/10. The grammar in the story could use improvement. Many sentences are awkward, missing pronouns, have the wrong verb forms, are missing articles, have unnecessary words and missing commas, etc.

I'll try to go through some examples, but it's a little difficult since every sentence is different. For that reason, I very strongly recommend using free grammar editing software to help smoothen the grammar and make the sentences more understandable. You can use editors like Grammarly, QuillBot, and/or ProWritingAid to help, or you can hire an editor on Wattpad through shops to help with the grammar/spelling, but mostly the grammar since the spelling was overall fine.

Let's start with this sentence: "So, according to Kanha's suggestion both and Subhadra decided to flee away." This sentence is extremely hard to understand, and I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean. Did you mean something like this: "So, according to Kanha's suggestion, both Arjun and Subhadra decided to flee"? The "away" is an example of an unnecessary word. Flee already means to get away, so you're pretty much saying "away away" by saying "flee away." It feels like that sentence was missing something, like "Arjun," another subject to agree with the "both" you used earlier in the sentence. So that's why it feels like a very awkward sentence.

Here's an awkward paragraph: After they confirmed about reciprocation of each others feelings Kanha explained the detailed idea of abduction to Arjun and Subhadra. The historical day of abduction proceeded as per plan. At a safe place Arjun thought to reveal his real identity to Subhadra as he had been living in Dwarka as a disguised sage.

What I'd recommend: After they confirmed the reciprocation of each other's feelings, Kanha explained the detailed idea of abduction to Arjun and Subhadra. The historical day of the abduction proceeded as per plan. At a safe place, Arjun thought to reveal his real identity to Subhadra as he had been living in Dwarka as a disguised sage.

I changed the punctuation, the "about reciprocation" to "the reciprocation" (that's an article error I mentioned earlier), added "the" in front of abduction (again, an article error), and changed each others to each other's since that was another grammar error. You need articles for nouns like abduction, hence why I added an article in front of it.

There are other grammar errors throughout the story, but that's why I recommend grammar editing software so the sentences are more fluid and readable. I hope the examples I used made sense.

Description: 6/10. The descriptions work for the story, and the world in particular has interesting information and descriptions attached to it. I only have a few suggestions.

I hate to sound like a broken record considering I just covered this in the last section, though one of my main critiques about the descriptions is that the grammar makes it hard to read at times, therefore making it hard to imagine the environments, characters, foods, items, etc. Along with that, there's a lot of telling over showing where you tell us everything the characters are feeling. You tell us exactly how they feel about each other, how they feel at the current moment, how they're speaking, etc. For example: "Then say that answer, Arya!" She came forward with an impatient urging. "Not now, Subhi. You will get your answer on that place which made questions arise in your mind," He denied her request yet fixed the place where she could get her answer.

Do you see how you say "She came forward with an impatient urging" and "He denied her request yet fixed the place where she could get her answer." You're telling us everything happening, almost like you're a director directing the audience to how they're supposed to feel. What I recommend is doing less of that and more showing over telling. Don't tell us she's impatient, show it through body language, facial expressions, dialogue, etc. Even when they're just hugging, you'll tell us the purpose of the hug, like it's to "make her relax" (38). That's why I suggest less telling and more showing. It's fine to use telling over showing. Every writer uses it; it's necessary for exposition and things like that. However, any area you can trim how much telling you're doing could be beneficial. I'd suggest ProWritingAid's article on showing over telling if you're ever curious to look into more about showing over telling.

Other than those few things, the descriptions work for the story.

Themes and Emotions: 6/10. The themes and emotions throughout the story are good and do a good job supporting the characters and plot. I have a few suggestions, but all of them tie back into everything I said throughout the review. I'll briefly explain below.

My criticisms are similar to the things I've said before where it's hard to understand the emotions because the grammar makes the story difficult to read at times, therefore making the emotions hard to read. Along with that, there was a lot of telling over showing that made the emotions feel less engaging than they could have, which is why I'd suggest focusing on doing more showing over telling and giving the readers the chance to feel the emotions instead of telling us what the characters are thinking and feeling. Of course it's okay to use telling, though be careful not to overuse it. I hope that makes sense.

Title/Blurb/Cover: 5/10. The title is overall good and has a good SEO score. The only minor critique I have is the capitalization is a bit inconsistent, and it doesn't seem to be a style choice since you capitalize the Pristine after the colon. So what I mean is the title is this: Parth Probodhika: Pristine hues of his peace. If we're going by standard title capitalization rules, it would be this: Parth Probodhika: Pristine Hues of His Peace. So what I'm suggesting is either that or this: Parth Probodhika: pristine hues of his peace. I'm suggesting either one of those because at least it's consistent. By having only the Pristine capitalized, it's clear it isn't a style choice. So what I'm recommending is either all lowercase after the colon, or standard capitalization rules after the colon.

The blurb could use some major tweaks to the grammar and spelling. Here's the blurb:

Love is a penance when we attempt to get that in our name, and the phrase of penance gets extended when we need to face challenges to ensure it's presence. After long years Arjun's penance of getting his love succeed. But is this the end of his penance? Surely not, it's just a phrase of penance completed.

Subhadra, who was pledged to preserve peace in Arjun's life was unaware of the fact that she has to face the cold war against the situation which seems calm, but has severity as it's companion.

Marriage needs time to be settled in family before being flourished in the society.

How will Arjun and Subhadra face challenges, and will change those into cheeriness for them at the end?

Here's what I recommend:

Love is a penance, and the phase of penance extends when we need to face challenges to ensure its presence. After long years, Arjun's penance of getting his love succeeds. But is this the end? Surely not; it's just a phrase completed.

Subhadra, who pledged to preserve peace in Arjun's life, was unaware that she had to face the cold war against the situation, which seems calm but has severity as its companion.

Marriage needs time before flourishing in society. How will Arjun and Subhadra battle their demons and settle into their new world?

I made numerous grammar and spelling changes. Like I mentioned in the grammar section, I would strongly suggest plugging your text into Grammarly, QuillBot, and/or ProWritingAid, three free grammar editing software that can help tweak the grammar errors. In general, I'd suggest playing around with the blurb to make it simpler and more understandable, and also consider rearranging/rewording sentences since you use "penance" a lot, which isn't good for engagement when the same word gets repeated over and over.

The cover is overall nice and suits the story. The only minor critique I have is the crown is a little off center and looks a little slanted. Otherwise, the colors are nice, the font is nice, and I like the flower. So I overall like the cover.

Total: 69.5/100.

BTS Christmas. - Don't Worry We Love You by emilypoole977

Review:

Characters: 7/10. The characters work for the story and make sense in their given roles. They're not OOC at any point, and I liked the decision to make them closer to their real-life counterparts so you can focus on telling a story about the idol life and what Namjoon goes through. The characters are overall good, though I have some suggestions.

It got a bit repetitive at times. Every chapter became a bit predictable since you knew it would be a new BTS member talking to Namjoon, Namjoon cries, the member comforts him, then the chapter ends. This pattern repeats six times in a row, and that's more than half the chapters, so that's why it was a bit repetitive. I feel much of this could have been combined. Maybe do two members per chapter. The chapters would be short but you'd be getting to the point a bit faster without needing to separate the chapters. Or maybe have two members per encounter. Instead of it being one-on-one with Namjoon and one other boy, maybe it's Hoseok and Yoongi interacting with Namjoon. Again, that cuts the chapters in half and removes some of the repetition.

The characters themselves are fine and work for what you're trying to do with the story, though like I said, I'd recommend a bit more diversity not only in how Namjoon is handled but also the emotions. Namjoon is described as crying a lot. For more than half of the book, he cries. I'm not against seeing idols in a vulnerable, sensitive spot like that at all, it's more that from a storytelling perspective, it can repetitive as I said before. In a short story, I recommend utilizing that time well and showing us all the sides of his emotions outside of crying. Maybe when he breaks the glass he stops and stares at it with his hands shaking. No tears, just silent hatred for himself. He quietly walks off and brushes off his friend instead of crying. That's one way you can diversify the emotions and add another layer to it, but I encourage you to play around with it. Since this is a character-driven narrative exploring the darker parts of Namjoon's life, I encourage you to play around with showing a bunch of different emotions during those first six chapters. Maybe each chapter he shows a different emotion to a different boy. Maybe you can even have it so he's cycling through the five stages of grief, like every stage except acceptance. So you can condense it to four chapters that cover Namjoon's denial that Army would treat him that way, anger over the comments, bargaining for a different career or different outcome for himself, and depression over the situation. Those are a few suggestions, but again, I encourage you to experiment and find what works for you.

Plot: 10/10. There really isn't much plot outside of BTS taking care of Namjoon, and that's fine since it's a character-focused story. I think it was a good decision to keep plot to a minimum to focus on BTS and Namjoon. In summary, there are no plot holes and the plot being more relaxed to focus on Namjoon was a good idea. For that reason, I have no criticisms for the plot.

Pacing: 8/10. The pacing is overall good and works for the story. It's short and to the point, and I think that's fine since it's supposed to be like that.

My only recommendation would be to consider slowing down in some areas to add more depth and give us more information about what's going on so we can better emphasize with Namjoon. Of course we emphasize because we're Army, but we need a reason in the story to emphasize and it shouldn't be based solely on real life knowledge, especially for Armys who don't know as much as other Armys. I'll explain a bit more in the worldbuilding section. I also suggest fleshing out Namjoon's emotions more by giving us a bit more depth/layers there, but I already explained that in the characters section.

Otherwise, the pacing is good.

Creativity: 7/10. The story idea itself is creative and blends real life with a fictional scenario to speak on what Namjoon goes through both as a leader and a person. It's a very domestic story following the schedule of Namjoon as he processes his emotions, and I think that was a good story idea.

My three suggestions are to consider diversifying the word choice, using less adverbs, and diversifying your sentences. You use the word "just" a lot, and since the chapters are so short, it's easy to notice when you're repeating words. In the "Don't you worry, we love you" chapter, the word just is used over 10 times. Just is also an adverb, so I'm using just as an example to show you're overusing certain words and also overusing adverbs. There are other adverbs, like suddenly and quickly, you use a lot too. Since adverbs are telling over showing, that's why I recommend using them less. Lastly, the sentences could benefit from being experimented with since you'll notice a bunch of them start with "I." I'd suggest playing around with the sentences and rearranging them to use more things like introductory clauses and avoiding pronoun usage by starting sentences with new words. Like this sentence: "I sat down on the bed with my back against the headboard." I'm not saying these suggestions will be perfect, but these are examples of ways you can take the sentence:

As I sat on the bed, my back pressed against the headboard.

OR: Sitting on the bed, I looked at the guys and smiled.

Those are a couple of alternatives to show how many different ways the sentence can be written, but both ways remove the "I" starting the sentence, giving the sentences a bit more diversity.

The overall creativity is good.

Dialogue: 5/10. Dialogue tags are formatted correctly, which is good. The dialogue does its job and serves the story along with having good grammar/spelling, though I have a few suggestions for presentation and execution.

One is not to use as many tags. Sometimes you use two tags when the same person is speaking, and in general, you use tags for almost every single line of dialogue if not every line. That's far too many, and that's why I'd recommend the 50-30 advice of dialogue tags for you. Since dialogue tags are telling over showing and can be repetitive to read, it's recommended to try and limit them, and that's where 50-30 comes in. This 50-30 advice states that of your dialogue, 50% or less should be tagged, and of that 50%, 30% or more should be said or asked, that way you aren't calling as much attention to them.

The next suggestion I have is to not use actions as dialogue tags. There were times words like "laughed" or "cried" were used, but I'd suggest not doing that since they're unnatural tags. If you say something like "I miss you," he smiled, it's unnatural because the tag being "he smiled" implies the words are smiling, not the person. Dialogue tags are called dialogue tags for a reason: they tag dialogue, not people. Words can be said, asked, whispered, shouted, etc., but they can't be smiled, laughed, cried, etc. since those are actions, not ways of speech. Maybe an argument can be made for cried, but I still advise against it. There's an easy fix for this. Instead of using an action as the tag, use both or only the action and no tag. Like this: "I miss you," he said with a smile. Or: He smiled. "I miss you." Both of those are more natural alternatives.

Next, there isn't much happening around the dialogue. A lot of the dialogue is like this:

"Line one."

"Line two."

"Line three."

"Line four."

"Line five."

And so on. I recommend switching it up every once in a while to give us more unique character moments. Remember how I said earlier that Namjoon's emotions could benefit from being diversified? You can do that through dialogue. Remember a story isn't dialogue but rather the actions leading up to said dialogue. Dialogue is only as important as what's happening around it, hence why it's so important to have things happening when dialogue is. Consider incorporating more body language, facial expressions, repeating words (like stuttering without doing the m-multiple letter thing), etc. You don't have to do it all the time, but consider doing it more. I say this because every time we talk to people in real life, things are happening around us. Even just sitting here typing on my keyboard, I hear cars flying by, my fan is blowing my hair, my nose is itchy, I take a break from typing to crack my wrists, etc. And I'm not even talking. I'm just typing and that much is happening around me. Now imagine an emotional conversation between two or more people. A crap ton of stuff would be happening, especially during Christmas. That's why I recommend making the dialogue more than dialogue, and you only have to do this every once in a while, but it will give the emotions more weight.

Lastly, I would suggest tightening the dialogue to make it more interesting and less awkward. For example, consider cutting out most of the "Okay" lines in the story since most of the time they don't do anything. In fact, I found many of those lines to be a bit awkwardly placed. Since you're trying to keep this a short story, consider removing all the dialogue that doesn't directly enhance the story, like Jungkook telling Bam to get down and the hi's and hello's and things like that. You can simply jump right into the core of the dialogue to keep the pacing moving at the speed you'd like while also removing awkward/unnecessary dialogue. If your goal is to keep this as short as possible, then that's a great way to shorten it even further but also open up more room in the word count for other more impactful things.

Worldbuilding: 5/10. There's not much world in this, so it's a bit hard to judge this category. There doesn't necessarily need to be a world, but maybe more in-depth looks at what kind of hate and stuff Namjoon is getting, especially for Armys reading this who aren't as well-versed about all the events that have happened over the enlistment period. For me personally, I went on a public break from BTS after they announced their enlistment because I wanted to focus on becoming a better person, focusing on my studies, and focusing on writing. For that reason, I haven't listened to much of their music or kept up with them. I didn't listen to most of the solo music not because I didn't want to support them because I do (I bought most of the albums despite not listening to them), but rather because I don't have the same time to stream, vote, and keep up with everything, so for me, I actually have no idea what comments Namjoon was referring to, and it could be interesting to see more in-depth looks at what's going on. I know the basics of what's happened since their enlistment, but like I said, since I haven't kept up with it much, it was a bit hard to follow the story at times. Like in Jimin's POV, it's not shown what Army said to Namjoon. It's okay if you don't want to say exactly what the hate comments said, but maybe give some more clues outside of questioning how Army can be mean to him could go a long way. It's just a little vague, and I'd suggest more specific detail. This detail could only take a few words or one extra sentence, but it goes a long way.

Along with that, I forgot it was a Christmas story until the end. It kind of feels like it's in the background for most of the book, and it could be interesting to use the holiday for a storytelling purpose, otherwise I don't see the purpose of specifying that it's Christmas. For example, maybe the boys come together to get Namjoon a Christmas present compiling all the positive comments from Armys to show there are good Armys and more proof that RM is loved. So instead of it just being BTS loving Namjoon, it's like this: "We love you, but we're not the only ones." Then they show the gift. Maybe his mother gets him a gift that reminds him of his childhood and gives him more hope and love for himself. Maybe BTS takes Namjoon out on the streets and they see carolers singing their music. Those are just three ways to give the Christmas time period more impact, but I encourage you to play around with it.

I don't think this story needs much of a world since it's so character-focused, so I think it's fine there aren't major descriptions about the world and environment, though I still suggest giving the time period more weight and giving more specific details about Army.

Grammar/Spelling: 8/10. The grammar and spelling is overall good aside from one critique.

The only major thing is there are tense issues where the tense gets confusing. Sometimes during a present scene you use past tense, and sometimes in the flashback scenes you slip into present tense. Since you write in past tense for flashbacks and present tense for present scenes, I'd suggest keeping the tenses separate except in the exception cases, like how dialogue can be present tense no matter what because it's immediate. The Namjoonie Smiling chapter has a lot of tense issues. It's supposed to be a scene in present time as far as I'm aware (if it's not, I'd suggest making that clearer because it does not come across that way), but it's written in past tense with some slips into present tense. When there were present scenes before, they were in present tense, not past, which is why I'm suggesting a bit more consistency, especially since tense is so important for readers being able to comprehend what's happening.

The grammar/spelling is otherwise good.

Description: 6.5/10. Like I mentioned in the worldbuilding section, this isn't a story meant to have lots of descriptions about the world, so I think it's fine that you don't have many, and I think the overall descriptions are fine for the book, though I have some suggestions.

My suggestions have to do with character emotion. As I mentioned in the characters section, the character emotions could benefit from being described more. Or at least consider more diversity since, like I said, the crying got a bit repetitive and could have benefitted from being changed here and there to give the emotions more variety and, as a result, more weight. We can only see the same emotion so many times in a row before we find it repetitive, which is why I'm focusing so much on that. So that's my main suggestion: consider going into more detail about Namjoon's emotions and/or diversifying the emotions to include more.

This is probably a strange thing to say, but consider combining more of your paragraphs. Most of the story is just a handful of lines broken up when they can be put together. For example, from the chapter "Don't you worry, we love you," there's this:

I feel ashamed saying this, but I was dreading it.

I know I shouldn't have been so nervous to talk to my bandmates.

But I really didn't feel like talking.

That's what I'm talking about right there where those three lines could have been combined like this: I feel ashamed saying this, but I was dreading it. I know I shouldn't have been so nervous to talk to my bandmates, but I really didn't feel like talking. It flows a bit smoother since readers don't have to scroll as fast and we have more time to look at what's going on.

So overall, the descriptions do what they need to for the story, though some depth here and there and considering combining more lines to make paragraphs is what I'd recommend.

Themes and Emotions: 7/10. I like the themes present in the story surrounding Namjoon's idol life and how his mental state is fracturing under the constant stress and terrible events in his life, like Moni passing. I was pleasantly surprised to see Moni's passing covered here since I don't think I've seen any other fanfics talking about it, so that was definitely unique and interesting to see. I think the focus being on Namjoon was a good idea, and I overall think the themes are one of the strongest parts of the story.

Most of my criticisms boil down to what I've said earlier about considering diversifying the emotions displayed and also diversifying things like the word choice and chapter contents like I discussed in the characters section. With those tweaks, the themes/emotions could be even stronger.

Title/Blurb/Cover: 6.5/10. After reading the story, I'm not sure if the Christmas theme is necessary since it didn't have much impact on the plot and characters. Like I mentioned in the worldbuilding section, I forgot it was a Christmas story, so that's why I wonder if the Christmas theming is necessary and if the title can just be Don't Worry We Love You. The title is okay and works for the story, it's just the Christmas part I'm on the fence about since it didn't feel like it factored into the story that much.

The blurb is simple and to the point, though there are grammar errors. I would suggest running blurbs through free grammar editing software like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and/or QuillBot to alleviate any errors. Here's the full blurb: It's the lead-up to Christmas and all the members are looking forward to seeing their families but there's one member whose year hasn't been going great can the rest of the members help him?

Here's what I recommend: It's the lead-up to Christmas, and all the members are looking forward to seeing their families, but there's one member whose year hasn't been going great. Can the rest of the members help him?

I added more punctuation and made it two sentences instead of one long one to help with readability. The blurb works for the story otherwise.

The cover works for the story and I like it. The only minor critique I have is the brightness of the snowflakes/lights is a bit high and could benefit from being less sparkly. It feels a little cluttered on the cover and a little overwhelming, which is why I'd recommend limiting how many there are and limiting the brightness. Otherwise, the cover works for the story.

Total: 70/100.

Destiny by _joonation_

Review:

Characters: 7.5/10. The characters have their moments where they shine and show clear personalities and have varying traits that clash at times. It was interesting to see the characters clash and face such huge differences, especially between BTS and Y/n considering they're the main characters and the core of the plot. So overall, you gave us clear character personalities and traits that stayed consistent throughout the narrative.

The deductions come from a couple things. First, something I'll mention throughout the review, is the grammar making the story hard to read at times, therefore making it hard to connect to the characters in the same way I could have if the grammar were smoother. The dialogue is also formatted wrong, meaning we're missing out on a huge chunk of character development. Script format dialogue makes the dialogue more on the dry side, making it harder to connect to characters. Lastly, there were some pacing issues with the pace going too slow at times and not giving us a chance to see how the characters engaged with the plot until 10+ chapters into the story, which is a long time to go without much plot and character interaction. It doesn't really get serious into the plot until 10+ chapters into the story, is what I mean. However, with all that being said, I still think the characters show interesting traits and personalities that make them worthy of a high score.

Plot: 7/10. The plot follows an arranged marriage between Y/n and BTS, all seven members. However, there seems to be a deeper plot brewing in the background the closer Y/n gets to BTS, leading to many conflicts. The overall plot works and is fine for the story. I think this is more focused on characters than plot since the plot takes a while to really kick in, so most of the plot is in the second half of the story, not the first. I think once the plot kicks in, the story picks up momentum and has more flow that makes the plot feel smooth and good.

I have two criticisms. One is that there are some pacing issues where, like I just said, the plot takes a long time to feel like it matters to the characters and what's going on in the story. There's a lot of fluff happening in the beginning where the pacing is unnecessarily slow, in my opinion. However, I will explain in more detail in the next section, though I'm bringing it up here to explain where the deductions came from.

Secondly, and maybe I missed something, but how did she get married to seven people? In most countries, South Korea included, it's illegal to get married to more than one person. I know they're rich, but there's only so far the "they're rich" excuse can go before we start questioning how they're allowed to break the law in such a massive way. It's one thing if she's getting married to two people since maybe I can buy they bribed the priest, but seven? That's a little much, and also I wasn't quite sure of the purpose of her needing to marry all seven outside of "it's a fanfic." For the plot, I feel it would have worked exactly the same if she was only married to one of them but they all lived together since BTS tends to live together. It felt a little cliche in that sense where the Y/n gets all seven of them, especially when I don't believe the law was ever addressed. If it was, I suggest making it more clear since I reread chapters 6-11 just to see if I missed anything about the arranged marriage as those were the chapters dealing with it, but even when her friends asked her how many she was marrying, none of them brought up how that's illegal and impossible for her to marry more than one person. Like I said, I could maybe buy it if it were her marrying two or maybe at most three people, but seven is too much of a stretch of the laws in South Korea. Both legal and common law says bigamy is illegal, so an explanation for how this is possible is necessary cause otherwise it makes the entire foundation of the plot unrealistic and impossible to believe. I understand it's fanfiction, but this fanfic is still grounded in the rules of reality, therefore it must follow the rules of reality. You can stretch rules here and there for sake of narrative, but stretching it that much breaks my suspension of disbelief. If even one person on the outside finds out they're married, that would immediately lead to legal disputes, and BTS are popular in this story's world, so it's expected that many many many people will find out 7 people married 1 person and that leads to legal problems. Even if the rich people bribed some local priests, it's extremely hard to believe they'd bribe the federal government.

So I overall like the plot, just be careful with those kinds of oversights and giving more clear explanations for those types of things, especially considering that marriage is the foundation of the plot.

Pacing: 7.5/10. When the plot gets moving later in the story, the pacing evens out and becomes balanced. Plot information starts revealing itself at a good rate, same with character information. My criticisms for the pacing all happen at the beginning.

The first few chapters feel like fluff and don't have too much impact on the future of the story. The plot doesn't really start until chapter 6, but I feel it should be starting as early as 1 or 2. The chapters are short so it's not a huge deal, but it's still something worth considering for future stories. There's a lot of fluff throughout the story where the characters go through their daily lives. I think it's absolutely fine if not good to show their daily lives, but after the first few chapters, I think we should start focusing more on the plot instead of having them still talking about exams, dealing with bullies and gossip, talking about studying, etc. Of course it's a part of their life that should still be present in the narrative, but more focus on the plot and the subjects outside of daily life could be beneficial to cover, especially during the beginning segments of the story where it's most important to hook your reader in.

This is a small thing, but I strongly recommend not putting a/ns in the middle of chapters since it breaks immersion and reminds readers they're, well, reading. They want to be immersed and not interrupted, and reminders of the real world like a/ns from the author writing the book pulls them completely out of the moment. It can be acceptable for fluffy fics or cute ones or comedies, though for serious stories like yours, it's important to be immersed the whole way through.

The pacing balances out later, but it takes a while to do so, so I recommend for future stories tightening the pacing in the beginning to hook the reader in more.

Creativity: 7.5/10. The story idea is definitely overdone. The arranged marriage trope has been done time and time again, so by this point, there are very few ways to take the arranged marriage trope in a new direction. This story has a standard arranged marriage trope. I don't think that's inherently a bad thing since there is a large audience for this trope, though that when combined with the fact that it's extremely hard to believe one person would get an arranged marriage to seven people makes the story idea not as strong as it could be. Again, it's not a big deal since there is an audience for this kind of narrative, though for a contest, I have to judge accordingly.

However, the sentence structure changes a lot, so I give credit where credit is due since the overall creativity in the language and how the story is presented is good. That is where the positive marks come from. All in all, the creativity is good, though the story idea could have had some twists on the trope to make it a little more unique as opposed to the standard arranged marriage storyline.

Dialogue: 5/10. I've already talked to you about script format, and your recent books from what I've seen uses book format, so I'm not going to go too into detail when I already discussed it with you elsewhere; however, since the dialogue here is written in script format for every chapter, I have to judge accordingly even if you no longer write in script format. For that reason, major deductions must be applied here since dialogue is formatted incorrectly both in terms of it being in script format and also the script format having errors.

So dialogue is formatted wrong, the script format is formatted wrong, and there are frequent grammar errors within the dialogue that made it hard to read at times.

For fairness of the review, I will briefly summarize why the deductions were given. Script format is not proper formatting for book dialogue, therefore it is incorrect formatting. Along with that, when we use script format, we do not use dialogue tags because there is no purpose to the tags, therefore making that incorrect as well. As for the grammar errors, I will go over those later in the grammar section, but there were frequent errors like comma errors, capitalization errors, bold errors, etc. that made dialogue hard to read at times. For those reasons, I will put half marks toward this category due to frequent grammar errors, incorrect formatting, and incorrect usage of script format.

But again, since your newer works don't use script format, I don't think it's anything to worry too much about as I've already talked to you about how much your grammar and dialogue has improved, and I think that's what matters most.

Worldbuilding: 5/10. I think there were some parts of the world that I liked. While I have many criticisms about the college, I can appreciate how you gave us clarity about how old these characters are and what their maturity level is through their environment and the situations they have to deal with, like bullying and gossip. So there were parts of the world that I liked and thought fit in well with the narrative, though I have criticisms mostly about college and how it's handled.

The main critique of the world I have is there are many college inaccuracies. For example, the first chapter says Y/n "entered college," but that doesn't make sense. College isn't a building; college is a series of buildings with different purposes and structures. Even in the smaller colleges, there are multiple buildings and places students go. So it's far more accurate to say "Y/n entered the lecture hall" or "Y/n entered the *insert name here* Library," or "Y/n entered the west gym," or "Y/n entered the academic building," etc. Colleges are made up of various buildings, not just one, so saying "Y/n entered college" doesn't make sense and that seems more like high school than college where high school is one building while college isn't. Along with that, teachers are normally called professors, not teachers. At that level, many have PhDs and prefer to be called doctor, too (especially in the STEM field). It's also a little weird that there's detention. I've never heard of detention in college. They're adults, so they're past that stage. College isn't high school. You're paying to be there in most cases, so they don't waste time on minor offenses like being annoying or loud or picking fights. The individual professors may punish them with marks off or extra homework, but not detention. Like I said, they're adults. In high school, detaining students in detention is fine, but it's against the law in many countries for colleges to hold students in detention. In general, the way the classroom procedures and how the daily life goes is very high school, not college. Like talking about buying lunch using other people's moneys. Most colleges have a meal plan through the students' ID cards. It's very inconvenient to pay for lunch every time and far better to use a card, so I'm surprised they're not talking about using ID cards to scan and pay in like 0.5 seconds as opposed to the long wait for cards and cash. It's not that it's implausible that they'd use money and credit cards and stuff every time, but that's just another layer that makes it feel more high school since college is known for adults doing whatever they want whenever they want. And this isn't just my perspective. My best friend is studying abroad in South Korea, where this story takes place. I also was accepted into not one but two study abroad programs for South Korea and had to extensively study the college life there. As for my best friend who's there now, we talk about the different customs between American and SK college, and it's not as different as you'd think, so these things I'm saying aren't limited to America, either. That's why I'm bringing it up in such a large paragraph.

I feel like the easy fix would be to make this take place in senior year of high school where Y/n is 18 and so are the other characters and they're getting married as a celebration of adulthood and all the other reasons within the narrative. So they're still adults, just younger, and now all the settings make more sense.

Another critique I have is the world isn't very specific. The college they go to isn't described much, I don't believe it has a name, the restaurants they go to don't have names or atmospheres described to us, the cars aren't described to us or said what model they are, etc. It's just a little vague, and I'd recommend giving more detail to the world to make it feel more impactful and real. If it weren't for the mentions of kimchi and the Korean language, I wouldn't know this story was in South Korea because there isn't much culture or description given to show us it's South Korea, if that makes sense.

So the world has some strong elements to it, though it could use some tweaks to being more specific and giving a more accurate depiction of college.

Grammar/Spelling: 4/10. There are frequent grammar and spelling errors throughout the story, and I will cover a few of them here. You've had a major improvement to your grammar in your more recent works, and this is a 2022 work, so I will briefly go over a few things, but I won't go too too crazy since most of these are things you've already changed. For sake of a fair review, though, I will go over them and explain the deductions.

I've already said many times that I'm not a fan of bolded dialogue because it practically fries my eyes and I have to switch devices just to be able to read it, which is a major inconvenience to me, especially for something that doesn't impact the story in any way. It hurts reader's eyes, and it's also a little insulting since it implies the author doesn't trust the audience to pay attention to the dialogue. That's why I strongly recommend not bolding dialogue; however, personal preference aside, what I'm here to talk about is how you sometimes bold wrong.

J hope whispered to himself why is the teacher behaving like jin Hyung but y/n heard it too and started giggling

Do you see how the entire statement is bold, not just the dialogue? So if your goal is to bold dialogue, you're sometimes bolding descriptions too, which makes it hard to read. Since you're conditioning us to know that bold = dialogue, if you put standard text in bold, it'll make us think it's dialogue and confuse us.

There are frequent capitalization errors where you lowercase proper nouns, like Mr. lee instead of Mr. Lee, or yoongi instead of Yoongi.

There are frequent end punctuation errors where you don't have end punctuation when you need it. By that I mean there are many sentences where you don't have end punctuation like full stops/periods, question marks, exclamation marks, etc. Every sentence needs end punctuation in order to show that it ended, otherwise you're saying the sentence is ongoing.

There were frequent comma errors where commas were needed but not placed.

There were frequent spacing errors where you added extra spaces between punctuation and words. Like: How are you y/n now ?. There's an extra space between the now and ?. I'm only bringing that up since it happens frequently.

There are there their and they're issues, like this "What is it , were their any problem yesterday ." That's also an example of the spacing errors, and also my next point is that there were plural errors where you needed words to be plural but they weren't. So the sentence would look like this: "What is it? Were there any problems yesterday?" Problem needs to be problems.

The last thing I'll bring up are abbreviations and not using them (like btw) since no one says b-t-w, we say by the way. By typing btw, you're saying the characters are actually spelling out b-t-w, not saying by the way, which would be really awkward for spoken dialogue, hence why I'm recommending not using them.

But most if not all of these things have been fixed in your recent works. It's not a big deal, but out of fairness for the review, I figured I'd explain everything even though you've already fixed these things in recent works.

Description: 6/10. This is a very dialogue-focused story, so it's a little hard to judge this category, though as the story goes on, there are more descriptions about the characters and what they're feeling. As the story progresses, I liked how more of that was shown and given to us. I'll give a specific example in the next section about chapter 11 and how I liked how you described Y/n to us.

My criticisms are the grammar makes some of the descriptions hard to read/process, there aren't enough descriptions and things happening around the dialogue to give said dialogue more emotional weight, and the over reliance on stuttering makes the character emotions hard to take seriously at times. That last one was something I've talked about with you before, so I won't go into detail, same with the grammar for the same reasons and also because I talked about it in this review already. As for the second thing, I think you could benefit from giving more descriptions of the environments, appearances, body language during dialogue, etc. Like I said, it's a very dialogue-centric story, but not much is happening around the dialogue. A lot of times, the dialogue will be like this:

"Line 1."

"Line 2."

"Line 3."

"Line 4."

"Line 5."

"Line 6."

There's a lot of dialogue but not a lot of break to describe what's going on around them. In real life, when we talk there are constantly things happening around us. I'm typing this in my basement and I can hear the floorboards creaking from my family walking around, my fingers are aching from typing so much, the radiator is humming, my laptop fan is loud, it's cold, there's rain pouring, etc. And I'm not even talking, I'm just sitting here. Now imagine a conversation between two or more people. There's a bunch happening, so consider including more of that to make the dialogue more realistic and engaging to read. That's what I mean when I say you could benefit from adding more descriptions in some places.

So, overall, the descriptions were fine, though they could use some tweaks.

Themes and Emotions: 6/10. There were quite a few solid themes and emotions present in the story. For example, I liked the opening of chapter 11 and how it slowed down to give us a peaceful reflection of Y/n's current mental state. It was a nice, quiet moment to explore more of Y/n's feelings and give us her thoughts outside of the comedic scenes, bullying moments, and arranged marriage.

My criticisms are all things I've said throughout the review about grammar making some of the emotions hard to decipher at times, telling over showing, and a little more description to give the characters more impact, clarity, and complexity. The themes and emotions are interesting throughout the narrative, and with some tweaks to the presentation, I think they'd be even stronger.

Title/Blurb/Cover: 6.5/10. The title has been done many times in the past, so it is a little overdone, but it fits in with the story, so it's not a big deal. It's a short title that matches the theme of the story, so I think it works.

The blurb is a little vague which I'm okay with, but the criticism I have is it's a little confusing at the end. It's one thing to be vague, and another to be confusing. This is the blurb:

What if someone who hates violence, someone who lost her loved ones is married off to the epitome of violence What if someone who hates love is married to the epitome of love What if destiny brings them together, they were never strangers yet so unaware of each other's presence.

Do you see how there's no end punctuation until the last sentence? So technically your entire blurb is one sentence, making it grammatically incorrect, but the last sentence is the part that's a little confusing. What if destiny brings them together, they were never strangers yet so unaware of each other's presence. I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean. That's two different sentences together, so they should be separate or at the very least the comma should be changed to a semicolon. I asked my father, a writer, about this sentence, and he felt it should be flipped where you talk about them not being strangers but not knowing each other either and destiny brings them together, that way the sentence flows smoother and you have more of a chance to clarify what you mean. Did you mean they weren't strangers but didn't know each other either? It's just a little confusing and I'd suggest rewording it. Grammatically, I'll post my grammar suggestions here:

What if someone who hates violence, someone who lost her loved ones, is married off to the epitome of violence? What if someone who hates love is married to the epitome of love? What if destiny brings them together; they were never strangers, yet so unaware of each other's presence.

I added end punctuation and commas, and changed the comma after together to a semicolon.

The cover is overall nice and I like the style of it. I like how there are blood splatters, and I like the concept of the cover with the outline of the girl being overlayed on the boys. The only criticism I have is the title. The title feels a little randomly placed, small, and like it's the wrong color. The bright blue feels a little too contradictory to the dark color scheme you have, and I feel maybe a blood red gradient (not too dark, though) could make it match more with the theme of the cover. Since it's a violent story, a blood gradient on the title could be interesting to look at. I'd also suggest making the title larger because it looks more like subtext than a title card, and consider playing around with the title placement to make it more noticeable. Maybe consider making it more center and larger so it stands out more.

Total: 62/100.

Better Than Before by _insert_name_here_

Review:

Characters: 8/10. There are many things about the characters that I like. Before I get into the two leads, I'd like to take a moment to appreciate Jake's character and his apology by the end of the book. The golden child narrative wasn't what I was expecting when I saw the title, but I'm glad you took it in that direction and covered how immaturity was Jake's downfall, and by the end, seeing him admit to being in therapy and genuinely apologize was satisfying and not what I was expecting when I first started reading. I thought for sure he'd be some monster with no redeeming qualities, but I have to give credit to him for acknowledging the problem and also not letting Kelsey apologize because he acknowledged he was so far in the wrong that she had nothing to apologize for. But the only reason that storyline is effective is because you wrote it in a way that makes sense and gives Jake genuine emotion the reader can get behind. I really liked the ending and how you wrapped up Jake's character. He was more important and complex than I was expecting, and I appreciate that you took the chance and gave him those layers.

Along with that, Kelsey and Sean are good leads who have a good amount of chemistry through their banter and character interactions. I like how you actually give them a lot of time to talk to one another and figure out how they work as a couple. As individuals, I like them too. So overall, the characters are good.

I only have a few critiques. First and foremost, there is a lot of exposition to the point where it's hard to connect to the characters because I'm being told everything about them, not shown. I'll go into telling over showing later, but let's focus on exposition and how we're told a ton of information about Sean and Kelsey in the first few chapters instead of given a chance to see their personalities. We're told Kelsey's feelings and why she feels that way, her backstory with smoking, her restaurant backstory, etc. We're told Sean's backstory and how he feels about his family. Exposition is needed in every story, but I really don't think readers needed to know Kelsey's smoking origin in chapter 1. In my opinion, it would have worked far better for the pacing to move it elsewhere to give us more time with Kelsey. We don't need to be told why she smokes. Someone smoking says a lot about them without you needing to tell us. If we see someone smoking, we can draw our own conclusions about why they're smoking. Heck, you might not even have to tell readers at all why Kelsey smokes. You can show us by showing her getting anxious and stuttering (like she repeats words and phrases a lot and desperately goes for a cigarette while she does so), and we can draw our own conclusions from that.

Secondly, like I just mentioned, there is a lot of telling over showing and repetitive word choice that made the emotions sometimes not feel as well-rounded as they could have been. I'll go into the word choice later in the creativity section, though, I just thought I'd mention it here to explain the deductions and act as a precursor for the far more detailed explanation (with examples) I'll give later.

The characters are overall good, and I like the direction you took them.

Plot: 7.5/10. The plot is straightforward: Kelsey needs to talk to her ex-boyfriend, Jake, and get closure on the relationship; however, things don't go quite as planned after she bumps into Sean, and a new relationship sparks between them, making it better than before. There are other moving parts in the plot, too, like the tension between Sean and his family. I think the plot is good and works for the story. I like how there's a sibling rivalry with the golden child Jake while Sean is cast aside, and he's also not surprised when his parents aren't there when he comes home for the first time in a long time. Those smaller details were nice, and I enjoyed reading them. I overall like the plot, I just have some criticisms for the pacing and the prologue.

The prologue isn't really a prologue. Prologues and first chapters are different, so the terms aren't interchangeable. Typically, prologues take place before the story (hence the prefix "pro") and don't involve the main characters. Or if they do, it involves the main characters at a different stage of their lives. Here, the prologue is neither and directly connects to the first chapter. What I mean is it's the same timeline. There's no time difference between chapter 1 and the prologue. So there's nothing in the prologue that really makes it a prologue. It's not a big deal, but when you have a prologue, it sets the reader up to think a certain way, but then the prologue isn't a prologue so we're left a little confused. That's why I suggest renaming it chapter 1 since there's nothing that really makes it a prologue and not a first chapter, and it leads to unnecessary confusion for readers.

The next thing I'd like to mention is the pacing is very slow, and while I have no problem with slow pacing, this pacing felt a little too slow, though I'll go more into detail about that in the next section. I'm bringing it up here because it takes a long time for the plot to get started and Kelsey to meet Sean. It's fine if it takes time, but that time needs to be justified. A lot of that time was spent with Kelsey walking around and checking into her hotel, or Sean taking a shower and looking around his house. I feel these scenes didn't need whole chapters dedicated to them but rather maybe a minute or two tops, then if you really want to explore those things, you can do so later since it's a 28 chapter long story, so you have plenty of time to explore those things. Readers want to be hooked in right off the bat, which is why I'm suggesting revealing plot information a bit faster and downsizing on exposition and descriptions. I like your descriptions, though I caution against using too many before the main plot starts.

The plot is overall good, it could just use some pacing tweaks, and I also recommend renaming the prologue.

Pacing: 6/10. The pacing picks up in the second half of the story with plot events and character information revealing itself at a balanced rate that keeps the readers invested. I overall think the pacing is good and works, and all my criticisms are about the first half of the story and some of the formatting of the paragraphs.

There are some paragraphs that felt unnecessarily split. It's not a big deal in the long run, but it did make the text a bit awkward at times since we had to reread to understand what was going on. For example:

"What the f/ck am I actually doing" Kelsey muttered as she ran her fingers through her hair, dragging them down towards her open bag beside her and grabbing her pouch of tobacco, pre rolling a much needed cigarette to inhale once she got out of the station.

A habit she picked up from moving to London those four years ago...

You see how the "A habit" is separated? Even though it's directly related to the previous paragraph, it's split. I'd suggest combining it since that makes it easier to read and keeps the same main ideas together. Especially in this context because the "A habit" sentence is reliant on the previous paragraph to make sense. By isolating it in its own paragraph, it makes less sense now that it isn't directly connected to what it's related to. It's not a huge deal, but since this is something that happens frequently, it does add up over time.

The next thing I'd like to mention is the pacing in the beginning could be tightened a bit. The prologue and chapter 1 is almost all exposition about Kelsey, and I always recommend starting with as little exposition as possible. It's understandable to need some so readers understand the gist of what's going on, but we don't need everything right off the bat. This story has almost 30 chapters. There's plenty of time later to give readers more info, but at the start, we want to know what the characters are doing right at that moment. What I'm recommending is considering trimming some of the exposition about the restaurant in particular to get the plot moving faster. I really don't think we needed to wait until chapter 2 to get to the hotel with Kelsey; I felt that could have been done by chapter 1. Maybe a challenge is to combine the prologue, chapter 1, and the hotel part from chapter 2. I think you can accomplish this without the chapter being more than 9 or 10 minutes (it's currently 7 minutes long). And when I say the hotel part, maybe you can end with the "I guess I should put this plan in motion" as a little cliffhanger and hook for the audience.

Okay, hear me out because I understand I'm going in circles right now. What I'm suggesting is the following:

- Consider removing the prologue and making it chapter one.

- Remove the part about the plan and save it for chapter 2, so then readers are left curious about her plan and want to know more about it, hence why ending with "I guess I should put this plan in motion" would act as a cliffhanger.

- Consider starting chapter 2 with Sean instead of having that part in chapter 1, thus giving us more of a chance to connect with Kelsey before we switch POVs.

- Trim the exposition about the restaurant and focus on getting her to the hotel.

Now instead of it taking a prologue and a full chapter for her to get there, you're doing it in one chapter. The goal of creative writing is to do as much as possible with the least amount of words as possible without overwhelming the audience. So with those tweaks, we get the information from the prologue, save Kelsey's plan for the next chapter to give readers more incentive to read, and get her to the hotel faster to thus start the plot faster. So now chapter 1 would look like this: exposition from the prologue, getting off the train and to the hotel, ending with the line about the plan. Then chapter 2 would start with Sean and you can rearrange it as necessary.

I understand those are relatively big changes since that requires completely rearranging the first three chapters, but it's worth considering since there's a lot of exposition in the beginning, and it's recommended not to have too much exposition in the beginning because it can easily bore readers and, like I said earlier, you have plenty of time to give exposition throughout the story. Try starting with only what you absolutely need to give the audience, and save the rest for later. I hope that makes sense!

Lastly, in general the pacing is very slow. I have no problem with slow pacing seeing as I myself am a slow burn writer, but sometimes it felt unnecessarily slow. I feel a lot of the Sean stuff could have been cut down and condensed. Instead of taking half a chapter to talk about the photos, maybe tighten it up and consider cutting down on the descriptions and exposition. Like I mentioned above, there's plenty of time to give exposition throughout the story. It isn't until 3/4 of the way into chapter 4 that anything really happens plot-wise (when Sean and Kelsey meet), which is almost 40 minutes of read time. That's a very long time to go without getting to the inciting incident. I would suggest considering cutting down more and getting to that main event faster so the readers have more reason to keep reading.

Otherwise, the pacing is good.

Creativity: 6/10. The story idea is overall good. Like I mentioned in the plot section, I think it works well within the genre and it fits in with the characters and their personalities. I especially liked the golden child aspect of the narrative and how there were many small details put into it. It made the entire idea feel more fleshed out and real. Something I was also pleasantly surprised by was Jake. I already talked about him as a character, but the idea behind Jake and how immaturity can fester in young relationships was cool to see. All of my criticisms are unrelated to the story idea, and I think the concept is very interesting.

Be careful with redundancy, mostly with the word "back." There are many times throughout the story and even in the blurb where you'll say "returned back." This is more of a nitpick and not a big deal, but "back" isn't needed when you're using the verb "returned" because returned already implies "back." It's almost like you're saying "back back." You only need the "returned." Like I said, that's a nitpick, but since it did happen consistently, that's why I'm pointing it out. However, this leads into a bigger issue where there's also redundancy with repeated words in the same sentence. For example: "Clutching the ticket tight she gripped her bag tight..." (prologue) you see how you used "tight" twice back-to-back? I'd suggest using a synonym for one of them or rewording it so you only have to use it once.

While on the topic, be careful with word choice. There are times you get into the habit of using the same word multiple times in close proximity if not the same paragraph. Like "often" and "just" in the prologue are used a lot, and in chapter two, the word "photo" is used eight times in that final paragraph alone. Considering how many synonyms there are for photo, I'd strongly suggest replacing some of them or rewording the sentences so you don't even have to use the word that much. You can use like-minded words like "memories" as well. I.e. "Sean scanned each photo..." maybe you can use "Sean scanned each memory..." instead.

Along with that, I would suggest not using as many adverbs as you do. There are multiple chapters where you will use 50+ adverbs, like in chapter 24, you use about 51 adverbs. Like I said before, you use "just" a lot. It's a common word you repeat, and it's an adverb. It's also an emphasis word, so the more you use it, the less emphasis it has later. You use "softly," "gently," and "suddenly" a lot, too.

Lastly, consider more variety in the sentence structure. The overall structure is fine and works, though there were times you used too many introductory clauses back-to-back. That paired with the grammar error you have with not using commas when introductory clauses need them was a bit distracting, though I'll cover that in the grammar section. In chapter 3, toward the end there's a paragraph that starts with "Removing it from the fridge..." and every sentence in that paragraph uses an introductory clause. Along with that, the two sentences after that paragraph start with intro clauses, which means that's five sentences in a row starting with introductory clauses.

Overall, the creativity is good.

Dialogue: 7.5/10. The dialogue throughout the story is good and shows character personality well. The banter in particular is fun to read, and I'm glad you gave the characters time to talk to one another like I mentioned earlier. My suggestions are about the grammar and presentation of the dialogue.

Dialogue tags are done incorrectly. You often write tags like this: "Where are your clothes?" She whispered (chapter 4). It should be: "Where are your clothes?" she whispered. You also write dialogue tags like this: "Sorry." He mumbled. It should be: "Sorry," he mumbled. You also sometimes do them like this: "No Sean. I've had one hell of a day." she laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation she'd gotten herself into. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a tag or not, but two things. One: If it is, I strongly recommend not using that as a tag since that's not a proper tag. Actions (like she laughed, chuckled, smiled, etc.) are not proper dialogue tags and are very unnatural because tags tag dialogue, not people. So by using "she laughed" as a tag, you're implying the words are laughing, not the person. I would recommend using "she said with a laugh" as a tag instead since now you're using a speech tag (said) instead of an action, but you also still include the action. Two: If you aren't intending to use it as a tag, then I'd recommend capitalizing it since lowercasing it would be incorrect in that context.

The tags are very inconsistently done, but almost always, there's a period/full stop at the end of the dialogue when you're using a tag, but that's incorrect. When using a dialogue tag after the dialogue, the dialogue can end in anything other than a period/full stop because tags are continuations of the sentence, not new sentences. Here are examples of correct dialogue tags:

"Hey," she said.

"How are you?" he asked.

"I missed you," Raven said.

"I hate you!" he shouted.

All of them are lowercase except "Raven" because that's a proper noun, and none of them have full stops/periods because dialogue tags are continuations of the dialogue, not new sentences. That's why tags are always lowercase unless they're proper nouns.

So, to summarize, the tags are inconsistent, and I also suggest not having actions as tags if you're intending to use them that way. Since the tags are incorrect, it's hard to tell if you're intending to use actions as tags or not, but if you are, I suggest not doing that. I hope both of those suggestions make sense.

Worldbuilding: 10/10. The worldbuilding is overall consistent. I bleed red white and blue RAAAH RAAAH WTF IS A KILOMETER, so I can't tell you anything about the UK, but based on the descriptions here and how everything is consistent, this sounds pretty accurate to the real UK. I like how the characters use slang and the transportation is by trains, and also how the environments are described. Maybe some of those things sound small, but you'd be surprised just how many authors don't include those things and make the world very vague. It's nice to see specific details and language styles, giving the world more realism and intrigue. The descriptions surrounding the environment were good as well. It was nice to see the world be specific and have a genuine impact on the story and characters. No criticisms for the worldbuilding. I think you did a great job with it.

Grammar/Spelling: 6.5/10. The spelling is consistently in UK English. One of the most common errors I see is a blend between US and UK English. It's not a big deal since those are minor errors and nitpicks, but it shows attention to detail when you consistently spell in one English style, so good job with that. In general, the spelling and grammar is overall good, I just have a few recommendations.

There are some possession issues where you won't use 's. For example: "Twirling her grandmas ring..." (chap 1). It should be: "Twirling her grandma's ring...". This happens a few times throughout the story. On the other side, you also use 's when it isn't needed. Like this from chapter 3: "It's smooth golden band twisting easily, Kelsey made a note that she needed to get it resized." It's should be its.

There are consistent hyphen errors where words need hyphens but don't have them. For example: "But a much needed one when you're working in hospitality as that's the only time you can get a break when you're running those 10+ hour shifts." In this context, you're using "much needed" as a compound word, so it needs a hyphen, making it "much-needed." You're using it as an adjective to describe the break, so it becomes a compound adjective and therefore needs a hyphen. The same applies to other words like moss covered. It needs to be moss-covered because you're using it as a compound word. That happens in the same chapter in the first section where you say "Kelsey recognised the moss covered walls...". You're describing walls as moss-covered, hence why it needs a hyphen. I'm only spending so much time on this because this happens a lot, sometimes 5+ times in a single chapter, so that's why I suggest making sure these types of adjectives receive hyphens.

There are occasional tense issues where you slip into the present tense incorrectly despite writing in past tense. Present tense is fine to use in past tense for things like dialogue and direct (and typically italicized) character thoughts. It doesn't happen too often, so I won't take off as much as I normally do, but it's still worth mentioning.

Lastly, and most importantly, there are frequent comma errors throughout the story. You have both missing commas and commas when they need to be semicolons. For example:

Sean's eyes landed once more on the photo from Spain, maybe that's why his mum kept that photo up.

The comma needs to be a semicolon, and that's also an example of a tense slip where you use "that's" despite the sentence being in past tense and this not being an exception case where you can use present tense in past tense. "That was" would be the correct tense form there. Another example: "He was certain Kelsey was doing fine, rumour had gone around town that she had accepted the university offer up in London and has never returned since" (tense issue there). The comma after fine needs to be a semicolon. Along with that, that's an example of redundancy where you don't need "offer up in London," you can simply say "offer in London."

On the other side of things, here are missing commas: "Removing it from the fridge he grabbed a dish from the nearby cupboard, placing a generous helping onto it."

You frequently will use introductory clauses but not commas, and, in most cases, introductory clauses need commas. So it should be: "Removing it from the fridge, he grabbed a dish from the nearby cupboard, placing a generous helping onto it."

The overall grammar and spelling is good, it could just use those few tweaks.

Description: 6.5/10. The descriptions throughout the story are good and do a good job setting up the environments and character emotions. The character appearances are interesting and complement the environment descriptions well. I overall think the descriptions are good, though I have three critiques.

One is what I talked about before with considering using less adverbs since they're telling over showing. I won't go into detail here since I already explained earlier, though it does impact the descriptions since it's telling over showing.

Two, similarly, be careful with telling over showing in general. There are many times throughout the story where you'll tell us things after showing them, which isn't necessary. For example: "Her eyes red and puffy, evidence of tears that had fallen stained her cheeks." Not only is this sentence a little confusing because of the "fallen stained" part (did you mean "evidence fallen tears had stained her cheeks"?), but it's also unnecessary. When eyes are described as red and puffy, the very first thing readers picture is crying. That's why it's unnecessary to say the second part of that sentence. You don't need to tell us she was crying by saying tears stained her cheeks since we already know that. If you really want to include it, maybe mention moisture on her cheeks or something of the sort, but you don't need to come out and directly tell us she was crying like that is what I'm suggesting. There were several other times throughout the story you used telling over showing, like with the exposition. Using telling is fine and necessary at times, though be careful not to overuse it, and also make sure if you're telling over showing, you're doing it for a specific purpose.

The last suggestion I have is about transitions and making sure your descriptions connect. Let's look at this from chapter 3:

Sean stood under the shower head, the water cascading down his face and body, lathering his hair with shampoo he watched the suds disappear down the drain along with the pent up jealousy of his younger brother.

Staring in the fridge Sean took in what food his mum had left for him. On the middle shelf sat in a glass Pyrex dish, a homemade lasagna.

Do you see how it went from being in the shower to suddenly he's in front of the fridge? That's what I mean when I say transitions since that was a little jarring to read. I had to reread three times to ensure I didn't miss anything, but it's almost like he teleported to the fridge. That's why I'd suggest making sure all the transitions make sense and the characters are in their right places.

This is something I'm not going to take off points for since it's inconsequential to the narrative and a nitpick at best, but there were some formatting things where some chapters there were little tabs/indents for each paragraph, then later, there were none. Like in chapter 17, there were no indents while in chapter 20 there were. It's no big deal and it doesn't impact any of these categories, hence why I'm not taking off any points for it, but I thought I'd bring it to your attention since I have a feeling that's a copy paste thing. When I used to copy paste my work from Scrivener to Wattpad or Quotev, something similar happened. So I just thought I'd bring it to your attention in case you weren't aware that some chapters had the indents while others didn't. Again: I'm not taking off points for that.

Overall, the descriptions are good, and with some tweaks, they could be even stronger. I hope all those suggestions made sense!

Themes and Emotions: 7/10. I really like the themes in the story and how we're given different perspectives on love and relationships. It's not black and white, and people can change. I love how you decided to take it in that direction, and the themes were some of my favorite parts of the story. The emotions are also good and are complex. They're diverse and touch on numerous subjects instead of just one or two, making them feel more fleshed out.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but all my criticisms come from things I've said before about the telling over showing making the emotions not as well-rounded as they could have been in some areas along with the heavy exposition in the beginning halting the character development for the first few chapters until we got shown more information about them, not told it. So with some tweaks to the adverbs, telling over showing, and exposition, I think the emotions could be even stronger, but as is, they're strong and complex.

Title/Blurb/Cover: 7/10. The title is a little overdone and I've seen it many times before, or at least some combination of the words "Better Than..." It doesn't say too much about the story, but I'm not too picky about titles since I myself suck at titles and am in no position to be getting too picky about them. I think it's fine for the book, though if you ever want to experiment with more emotional and unique titles that ooze in romance, then I'd say go for it and see what works for you!

The blurb gives us a good idea of what the story is going to be about. My main critique is there are frequent grammar errors and some ways to make the blurb more concise and clear. Here's what I'd recommend:

Kelsey thought she left her seaside hometown behind her, along with the troubles of her ex-boyfriend. Four years later, he's still troubling her. Returning home to confront him, things don't go quite to plan. The one-night stay turns into a short break, and Kelsey finds herself a reason not to say goodbye to this small town fully.

Sean hasn't visited his family since settling into his new job in the city. Reluctantly, he returns home to reconnect with his parents and younger brother. But when he turns up to an empty house, he thinks it's all a waste. That is until the small town surprises him with a big personality that'll help him connect with more than what he anticipated.

Maybe, just maybe, for both Kelsey and Sean, things might end up better than before.

I altered the last sentence to remove the & and give it a bit more fluidity, and I fixed all the comma and hyphen errors.

The blurb is overall good, I would just suggest running blurbs through grammar editing software like Grammarly, QuillBot, and/or ProWritingAid since near flawless grammar/spelling is imperative for blurbs. Readers are more likely to click off if they see frequent grammar errors in the blurb. However, I still like the blurb, so other than the grammar, I have no suggestions.

The cover has a nice background image with pretty colors and a focus on the two main characters in the front. The only thing I wasn't too fond of was the title card being a little small. I feel it could be a bit larger since you have a lot of space available. But other than that small thing, the cover is good and works for the story.

Total: 72/100.