Title: Melody Starr

Author: AlexaZedler

Summary: 5/5

I love your summary. I think you've done a great job at introducing the protagonist and conflict with a sense of urgency and intrigue. As soon as I finished reading the summary, I wanted to click that read button and get on with it – which is a great sign! You've got a fantastic use of rhetorical question at the end, I love the symbolism of her life being a book, and the clipped sentences in the middle were very powerful.

My only suggestion?

...Melody is forced to confront the frightening truth.....

Please make sure your ellipsis at the end only has three periods, not five. 

Grammar: 3/5

As I mentioned again, ellipsis only require three periods – not five. So please make sure that remains consistent. Otherwise, your grammar wasn't too bad; the story itself was easy to read and follow. However, there were quite a few things I noticed.

First of all, dialogue and punctuation. If dialogue is followed by a verbal dialogue tag (such as 'he said', 'she whispered', 'she exclaimed' – or anything referring to how the character says the words), there should be a comma before the closing inverted commas. If it's anything else, this comma should be replaced by a period (or a question mark for a question and exclamation mark for an exclamation). For example:

"Morning Rachel." I say with a small smile.

It should be:

"Morning Rachel," I say with a small smile.

Next, while we are still on dialogue, if there is only dialogue in a paragraph (with nothing surrounding it), the dialogue should still end with a full-stop. For example:

"Be safe, blueberry,"

You need a full-stop instead of a comma. Additionally, Blueberry is basically what he is calling Melody, so it should be capitalised as a proper noun (especially since you capitalised it in earlier chapters). It should be:

"Be safe, Blueberry."

You're also mixing up tenses every now and then. You're mostly in present tense, but you sometimes drift off into past tense. For example:

I put on my poker face. [put = present tense]

The doctor gazed at me for a few seconds. [gazed = past tense]

You need to make sure your tenses are consistent.

Overall, you had quite a few typos here and there. I didn't write them all down, however, here are a few examples:

...shaking my head for the I-don't-know-what th

time today.

It should not be split into two lines. It should simply be:

...shaking my head for the I-don't-know-what time today.

A misspelling:

"Oh," Shee sounds disappointed.

Which should also be:

"Oh." She sounds disappointed.

You also kept spelling Los Angeles as 'Los Angelos'. I encourage you to go back and fix that up. 

Characterisation: 3.5/5

Melody is instantly relatable, and I love the language you implement to show her quirkiness through her narration. Comparing brushing hair to war? Reading After? Judging her friends for watching High School Musical in 2019? Fabulous. I also like the dynamic we saw with her family – her mum being unafraid to make mature jokes, and that easy comfortability. I do wonder, however, considering Melody's past, whether she should feel those little jabs of guilt whenever her parents act so loving towards her. Later on, she has moments of 'would they think this if they knew I killed someone two years ago?' – I wish I saw it a bit more in the past, because it'd add a layer of mystery to her character from the get-go.

Speaking of that past, I think that's a great motivation for her to not tell the police. It's very stressful to the reader see her lie to doctors (who seem very unconvinced with the broken glass story!) and police and family alike, but she makes up for it by showing us she is a good person; not letting Alison/Skylar die from Red, even if she's not particularly fond of her. Good complexity!

There were quite a few characters to keep track of, though most of them branched out quite a lot. I, personally, thought Sarah was hilarious (though I'm suspicious of her 'the puddle of water led me here' – only because I'm so paranoid!). My thoughts on some other characters, such as Harry, will be mentioned later in the review.

I do, however, think that your characters lacked a touch of realism every now and then. Let's look at a specific example – Melody going to rescue Alison/Skylar. She's climbing up a rope ladder, nearly falls to her own death. Sure, she makes sarcastic remarks and resorts to jokes about it, but the moment lost impact. It didn't make me feel the tension. You should slow it down, milk out that near-fall, and give her a moment to collect her bearings. Make the reader feel what she would feel – sweaty palms, perhaps? Pounding heart?

Because of these rushed moments, we lose Melody's voice as a narrator. For example, when the incident with Ivy happened, and Melody is back and school with Colin asking her to say thank you. She is grateful for Colin saving her (albeit, reluctant), but when he asks for her number, she straight away beats him up. It felt way too rushed – we didn't see any of that fury in her internal monologue. We didn't feel her anger or understand why she would suddenly lash out like that. Just one sentence or two of her thoughts that show the transition of emotion would suffice. 

Writing Style: 3/5

There is minimal setting, which made me a little sad because your summary gave so much promise of haunting, wintry imagery – and I didn't get enough of that. You have the typical descriptions of people, but not so much of the world surrounding the people. This, once again, makes the story lose its tension – it's less immersive, and you're not using the setting to contribute to a certain mood.

I do, however, love your usage of first person. Melody's voice is very fun, very sarcastic and funny, and is very enjoyable to follow. Well done! Just do be careful of the pace – it goes too fast for the reader to keep up with at times, and I think this is simply because you're not employing enough internal voice or description of setting. There is a lot of dialogue, and I think you need description to counteract that.

Also, for the sake of professionalism, let's quickly go over a few things:

"He is sooooooooo hot!"

Just italicise 'so' to get the same impression across without losing professionalism. Also:

"Come over at... Say, 9?"

Tricky rule, but generally, if you are saying a number that is ten or less, authors are asked to write it out. It should be:

"Come over at... say, nine?" 

Plot + Originality: 4/5

I love the concept! Pretty Little Liars/Gossip Girl sorts of stories always intrigue me. To be honest, I had my doubts in the first chapter – I've had to review a lot of stories, and they all start with the protagonist getting ready, describing what they're wearing and what they look like, going downstairs and rushing breakfast. However, then we see the shadowy figure watching her, and I was a lot more excited from there.

The texts are always thrilling. Especially the one where Melody was like, "He wouldn't kill me, right?" Next side, she gets the text going, "Sure about that?" I loved moments like that – it gives that sense of being stalked, of being surrounded. In fact, your story was never ever short of tension – from Lia getting hurt, to Harry going missing, to Ivy getting drugged... it all has begun spirally to a point of no return, which is so exciting for me as the reader. Even when it's not a moment of drastic tension, there are bumps of surprises here and there, like Lia being pregnant.

Also, that last chapter – what a cliffhanger! I'm very curious to see if there's someone I won't expect now that the hood is gone. I did think that, since Red sometimes has blonde hair and sometimes black, that Harry is involved. This is mainly because he was first described as having a 'shock of black hair', which was used later to describe the other Red (if I'm remembering correctly). And Harry was missing for a while to go to 'some mysterious friend's house' which was quickly glossed over.

That's just my thoughts on things! Excited to see how things unhinge from there. Once again, you need to make sure you keep things a bit more realistic when there are moments of tension by showing us how the character is feeling and adding that sense of immersion through description. Right now, it's going a bit too quickly for the reader to completely ground themselves.

OVERALL SCORE: 18.5/25

Overall, a very intriguing story with lots of surprises and tension! Make sure you work on your punctuation – especially in terms of dialogue – and you should be good to go. I hope this review helps!