Author: VreetiAggarwal

Genre: Teen Fiction

What I liked:
- I liked the concept of the old English writing in the river city legends. It had an air of mystery and was just a cool thing to add to the story that gave it some depth.

- The descriptions of the people were the best in the book. In other places it was lacking, but the appearances of the people stuck out.

What I didn't like:
(1) The writing was just really weird. I don't mean this in a rude way, but there are just really unnatural phrasings sometimes that distract from the story. An example from chapter one: "Don's dad, unable to contain his laughter anymore, laughed." I mean, who says something like that? Another example comes from the same chapter:

"Don's eyes widened again. This time it looked like they might burst out of his eye sockets. It was because he suddenly realised that he wouldn't get a car or even a motorcycle. He cursed under his breath."

This writing is offsetting because of several reasons. First, there isn't really any good description, which I'll get into later. Second, these are all blunt statements. "Don did this. It looked like this. This is why." Doesn't that seem a little bland? Instead, I might suggest upping the vocabulary level and trying something more descriptive, almost like testing the ability of your narrative voice as the author. What will give your readers a strong, decisive image of what's happening and describe the emotion at the same time? Author's voice—that is, what makes your writing as an author unique. For example, I might rewrite the sentences from earlier as follows:

"Don opened his mouth to retort something—"You've got to be kidding" or "What don't I get any say?"—but nothing came, so he clamped it shut and cursed to himself. Of course, if they were being taken to their new home in a horse-drawn carriage, he would never be in possession of a car like he'd hoped back in the city."

This not only give the moment a little more depth, but it explains Don's thoughts on not having any modern vehicles and gives the readers a good sense of his reaction. This also gives light to his character, which is another thing I'll get to later. For now, though, I would focus on giving your writing some life through occasional similes (ex. red like blood) and proper explanations of the character's emotions concerning the subject at hand (describe emotions, don't tell them).

(2) The grammar left much to be desired. Commas in particular had me staring at the pages with a discontented frown. The first sentence in the whole book is a run-on sentence with several missing commas and it only continues from there onward. I could get into the use of commas in this review, but that might get lengthy, so I'll end it with a suggestion to shorten your sentences and research proper comma usage. Also, some variability in the length of sentences might improve the overall flow of the writing.

(3) The description in this book was practically nonexistent, save for the descriptions of the people. This is a very important point: in order for your readers to properly form a mental image of the happenings of your story, they need a solid grasp of the environment in which it happens. If you don't properly establish the setting, we are essentially trying to paint a portrait without a model; we don't know what we're trying to picture and the storyline becomes incredibly hard to follow. Don't forget to take a moment when characters enter a new environment to describe their view:

"When the girl pushed through the door, the first thing that struck her was the overbearingly bright colors. The lamp was a conspicuous green while the walls were purple and the sheets on the bed sang out in hot pink as if the designer was unable to see color and needed the vibrancy to visualize it at all. She was temporarily blinded herself and blinked several times before continuing."

This isn't the most poetic example, but you definitely get a feel for the environment as the character enters to give you a good mental image to set the place. Another way you could describe environment if your characters are too busy to notice things at first is to introduce them gradually as the character collects their surroundings after, like, another character takes their attention or something.

"She trailed off as she noticed him staring off at something, then she followed his gaze and couldn't help but gape. Ahead of them, a grand cathedral rose from the field as if it had erupted from the very earth..." or "He began to lose interest in what the woman was saying and his eyes wandered to the ink stain on her desk, then to the haphazard stack of papers sitting on the other end of it. His gaze returned to the woman, noticing the dark circles under her eyes, and he pursed his lips." So in other words, describe things as your character sees them and the readers will see through your character's eyes.

(4) Character. Let's talk about it.

Characters are the literal lifeline of your story. When we fall in love with a book, we fall in love with its characters, not the plot, so if your characters are just nobodies who don't really get described, we won't care for your story. At all. So why am I telling you this, you might ask. I'll be blunt: your characters were glossed over and felt unimportant.

The whole goal of telling the story is to get us to think from your characters' perspectives, especially if it's written in first person. There's no excuse for not describing someone's thought process if we're literally being told the story from inside their head. We should be able to sympathize with the characters' actions and do this without having to try. If your character is describing the story to us, it feels like we're outsiders in someone else's book. If your character is telling the readers their story, have them take the readers into their own shoes and show us the story so we feel like we're part of it. We don't want to watch from a safe distance and be told the stories afterward. That destroys the point.

Remember also that each character in your book is a person. Don't get into the mindset that this is someone you just thought up, either. My characters are to me like amazing people who I unfortunately never get to meet. I don't think of them as figments of my imagination. Each of them has their individual, complex personalities and what makes them unique as a person, and that shows through their actions. If you take your character and say, "She's a tough nut. She doesn't open up to people easily and has a strong will.", don't then go on to write a character who comes off as perpetually angry and gets teased by everyone for doing things that are unrealistically stupid (like discovering she's holding a book upside down that she was literally just described as being "engulfed" in). In the same way, I don't really get any defining traits from Donnell. He's... an angsty teenager? He wants a car and can't get over his ex? I didn't really sympathize with either of your characters because they both didn't seem like real people to me. They seemed like someone filled out a character profile and said they had so and so traits and that's it. Well, that's not how people are, just saying.

(5) So there's something called pacing that makes a book bearable to read. It's basically the backbone to a well-written story that sets things in place so that the reader can understand the timeline of the writing. And... it just wasn't here. We don't need to read half a chapter of Consuelo saying "seriously? You don't know?" over and over. We get it. Move on to the thing Valerie doesn't know already. Not everyone uses the pages feature on Wattpad, but I just read five pages of "How can you seriously not know?!" It. Has. No. Substance (which is what I'll get to next).

So more about pacing. Pacing is the "speed" of your writing. The more you write about a scene, the longer it will take the reader to read it, and thus, that scene will feel longer to the reader. Take this into account when you are writing. Write emotions and thoughts in the slower scenes, write actions in the quicker scenes. When your character is in the middle of a fight, they're not thinking about dinner, they're running through their fight or flight instincts, reacting in this very moment to their surroundings, so don't describe their thoughts, describe their actions and make it straight to the point to the extent of choppiness. That's what the character is feeling, so it's what we should be reading.

For slower scenes, we can take the luxury of following the character's thoughts some. The character-building scenes are where this becomes especially important. We need to know what this character is like through not only their reactions to their surroundings, but the thoughts behind their actions. This is what will get us to sympathize with them and that's exactly what you want as the writer. Think of it as a movie. In the action scene, things go quickly. In the other scenes, things are allowed to play out a little, so we can get to know the characters and the environment.

I think one of the only ways you can truly learn to master pacing is by trying your hand at writing with that image of the story in your head and lots of practice.

(6) We need to talk about the substance of your story. What exactly is keeping us reading? I don't know; quite honestly, there was nothing that piqued my interest at all about your plot. So what exactly is the issue?

Well, in order to tell us a story, you must tell us the story. Don't beat around the bat or write a bunch of chapters just for the sake of putting words on the page. Words are definitely required to write a story, but the words do not make the story. Word count is essentially irrelevant. (Don't write a hundred words and call it a novel, that's not what I mean). So how do you know you're getting off the point of your plot? Well, you must imagine the story's goals. Know them and strive for them just as hard as your characters do. What's the goal of your story? To have two characters successfully start a relationship? To destroy the monster plaguing the fantasy land? The next question is this: Is your content actively working toward this goal? Are you spending too much time describing your characters' small talk and not getting to the point of introducing the plot point?

Another thing to keep in mind goes along pretty nicely with pacing: don't spend forever writing about irrelevant, everyday things. Think about the importance of the scene you're writing before spending too long writing about it. Is this scene really required for the story to make sense? Does this help develop the characters or introduce some twist to the plot? If not, don't include it. That's right, just chop it off! You don't need it, and we don't need to read about it. It gets boring, and that's the last thing you need your readers to be thinking. If your scene doesn't mean a lot to the story, consider glossing over it a little because we don't want the mundane, we want the scenes that further the plot and make us ask questions. We want secrets. We want drama. We want pretty much anything that isn't something we have too much of in real life like brushing our teeth or whatever. We don't need to read about that.

Another problem is that I can describe all of chapter one, part B as "Consuelo teased Valerie" and all of Chapter two, part A as "Donnell sat in bed and was bored." Not good. Neither of these things further the plot, and each of them is an entire chapter where essentially nothing happens. So. Boring.

(7) So back to weird wording. In the river city legends, everything is written in Shakespearean English. That's great! It gives it a sense of mystery. But you need to research your Shakespearean English. Firstly, "thee" is not the only pronoun they used; "thee" only stands for "you" when the person is the object in the sentence. Nothing else. There are so many other words to use and I feel that this part was just really lazily written. You can do so much more with this, so don't waste the potential. So cue Shakespearean English: a briefing.

Pronouns include:

Thou: "you" when the person is the subject of the sentence.

Thee: "you" when the person is the object in the sentence.

Thy: possessive form of "you" like "your." Commonly used before a noun that begins with a consonant/consonant sound (like the article, "a").

Thine: also a possessive form of "you," but commonly used before a noun that begins with vowel/vowel sound (like the article, "an"). Also used when indicating that something is "absolute and understood."

Ye: Plural form of "you"; used when addressing a group of people.

And these are just the pronouns. Imagine all the other vocabulary you could harness when writing in Shakespearean English! Wasted. Absolutely wasted. (Read more about old English here: http://unenlightenedenglish.com/2009/07/thou-thee-thy-thine-ye-shakespearean-english/)

(8) It took me a while to pinpoint this with your story, but you definitely need to work on expanding your vocabulary. At some points, I felt like the language skill put into writing this story was just too basic for me to enjoy the plot because a lot of words are repeated and all of them are really bland and it gets monotonous. You would not believe how fun it is to read a story with advanced vocabulary—it just gives the storytelling another layer of depth that can't be substituted any other way.

The way I would suggest going about expanding your vocabulary is something you probably predicted before even reading this paragraph: look up words you don't know! It's close to every single day I visit my thesaurus and dictionary to research words I'm not sure about or find new words to implement into my writing. I learn new words all the time this way. Another means of learning new words is reading. I mean, what a plot twist, right?

So we know it's pretty simple to learn new words; the problem is finding a way to commit them to memory. One technique I've heard of is to try using that word within a certain time frame after learning it. For example, I just relearned the word "ostentatious" from going back and reading my writing from a few months ago and I thought "what a cool word!" so now I'll associate the word "ostentatious" with that thought and remember the meaning of the word as "decorating something so as to be purposefully overdone." This may not work for everyone, but if you keep trying, you'll find your own way to learn new vocabulary and give your writing an irresistible variety.

Suggestions:
(1) Try working in the unusual wording.

(2) Study commas.

(3) Don't forget to describe the environment. Remember to describe from your character's eyes.

(4) Work on making your characters realistic.

(5) Character-building scenes are described, action scenes are told. Don't tell it all, remember to show.

(6) Keep the endgame of your story in mind and make every scene work toward that ultimate goal. If it isn't relevant to the story, we don't need to hear it.

(7) Research Shakespearean English and implement it.

(8) Expand your vocabulary.

I would rate this a 3/10.
Don't be afraid of doing research, because who doesn't like speaking in Shakespearean English? It's a cool party trick, if nothing else. Make your characters people and not characters, and give your story substance. While reading this, I didn't know what I was supposed to be rooting for and I didn't like any of the characters, which kind of threw everything down the drain for me. I couldn't take anything seriously when entirely insignificant scenes like Consuelo teasing Valerie in chapter one and Don's dad laughing at Don in chapter two took up a good chunk of the chapters they were in and it just, like, didn't stop? Who does stuff like that? It's redundant. There was just a level of "that would never actually happen" that ruined the story. I think you have something going with the whole river city secrets plot and what I predict is budding romance between Valerie and Don (didn't see that one coming), but without better execution, I would not willingly read this book again. Good luck!

This is merely my opinion and my advice, please do not try to correct it. This is what I thought of your book while I read it and it is entirely your choice what to do with it. That said, I worked really hard on this. Please be nice and remember that I'm trying to help you improve your writing.