Author: Trekkiehood

Title: Betrayal of the Secret City

Genre: historical fiction

Mature: nope. A bit violent, but not graphic.

Cover and Title: 3/5
The title was good, however the cover was very monotone. I get that was the idea, but since the title was white on a light gray background, it was very difficult to read.

Blurb: 3/5
The beginning was interesting, but it came out a bit unsophisticated. I think you changed tenses somewhere in there. And the last line "the story of..." is a bit overdone for my taste.
While the blurb adequately serves its purpose, it could seriously be jazzed up a bit more.

First Impressions: 3/5
While there were no glaring mistakes, and I really liked the father/child relationship at the beginning, the writing simply came off as unsophisticated. For example, and this is just my opinion, I'd always write out numbers rather than putting 14, because it makes you look like a more mature author. You can get away with putting numerals for for large numbers and sometimes in narration. But I have a huge pet peeve with writing numerals in dialogue. Again, that's just me, and it might seem petty, but it just makes it harder for me to see the writing as professional.

Characters: 4/5
I liked Jared, although I questioned his judgment sometimes. I feel like with such a short story, we didn't get enough development or depth. I would have liked to see more layers.

Grammar: 2.5/5
There were no huge mistakes. No spelling errors. All errors were minor, but the problems was that there were a large deal of them.
I saw at least ten missed commas within the first chapter, and while it doesn't take away from the story, it can be a bit of a nuisance to the persnickety reader.
Also, and I know this looks weird, when your dialogue ends in a question mark or exclamation point and the dialogue tag is a pronoun, that pronoun should be lower case.

Ex: "What's happening?" He asked.

This is incorrect because the question mark serves the same as the comma that replaces a period in dialogue.

Ex: "What's happening?" he asked.

This is correct.

Plot: 4/5
Very suspenseful, however I felt that the story was clearly written for someone with a lot of background knowledge of WWII. I was able to keep up due to studying European History, but I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't, I'd be pretty lost.

Overall: 3.25/5 or 19.5/30
Great for anyone who knows and is interested in an intense WWII short novel!

Sorry if you'd expected a better score. I can sound harsh, but I did enjoy your work.