Astania Reviews

A.L. Blaze | Being Reformed

Reviewer: 

Author: agsznn_

Story: Being Reformed

Chapters Read: 9

Cover and Title (3/10):
Let's be honest here. A cover is a crucial component when it comes to writing a book as it's the first impression that a reader gets before reading your book as a whole. To be honest, I would probably skip over your book with the current cover, which is a big no-right since authors take a lot of time crafting and weaving their stories but obviously, the readers don't know that or let's just say they don't care. Thus, a good book should have an enthralling cover, and considering that it's a chick-lit and romance genre, go for a more bright cover. There are a lot of graphic shops here in Wattpad to help you around if you aren't sure how to design a cover yourself.

Blurb (6/10):
Though the blurb is short, concise, and gives out a little information about our protagonist Magdalene, I would say that it's not quite enough to plunge in readers as there is a lot of romance-chick lit genre books out there that contain a more or less similar plot, and a blurb that doesnt satisfy the readers so as to give them a vivid picture to pick yours out of the many, might just get your book to be ignored. I would suggest having a blurb where you put in the setting of the story, a short background of Magdalene (without giving away too much of course), the point of the story, and if possible, end it with a cliffhanger as readers love drama and a cliffhanger would definitely catch their eyes!

Character Description (4/10):
I would say that you actually put in a lot of effort to describe your characters and their daily routines for example in chapter 1 and chapter 2, however, since there were a lot of descriptions rather than dialogues, it was more like telling rather than showing, that I couldn't catch up with Magdalene and other characters like Dorothy or Zelie. I felt like the descriptions were more or less forced as since there were no dialogues, it was hard to resonate with the characters, and at some points, the writing caught me off-guard where I had to go back and read twice to get at least a bit of the picture. I will discuss it in detail below.

Plot and Writing Style (3/10):
I'm not quite sure if this is your first time writing or if you actually have experience in writing, but I'll lend in the viewpoints as a reader. First of all, I felt like the writing is too wordy as there are a lot of descriptions in a single page where the narrator just keeps narrating without giving room for the characters to speak and the defect while writing like this is that readers don't get to resonate with the characters or walk along with them as they are just reading a tad long paragraph describing them and what they are doing.

Always remember the rule of 'show vs tell' while writing. According to this rule, maintain the ratio of descriptions to dialogues as it's balanced without making the readers believe that there is an imbalance between the two. Let's just say your protagonist is angry, without typing in Magdalene is angry, insert in a dialogue where she vents out her anger as it helps readers resonate with her while reading it out loud.

For example, in chapter 2:

'To Magdalene, he craved for attention so badly, maybe the position of deputy senior prefect wasn't enough for him.

She pushed aside the thoughts of confronting him when she on the other hand put less interest in the church she attended.'

As a reader, the first question that arose in my mind after I read this is how he craved her attention badly and where her 'thoughts' she pushed aside. This is where dialogues come into play. Before the 'she pushed her thoughts aside...' para, you can actually insert her thoughts in italics which makes it easier for the readers to contemplate and resonate with her.

Lastly, avoid the long white space at the beginning of the chapters, as readers might not be patient enough to scroll all the way down to find your text. Start writing from the beginning of the page, as reading is much easier that way.

Grammar (4/10):
Regarding grammar, there are a lot of grammatical issues and wrong sentence structure like for example in chapter 8:

Original: Zelie gritted her teeth, she loathed Asher's guts, been sitted near him increased how irritated she was. How can such a fine borbor run his mouth like he knew any better?

Revised: Zelie gritted her teeth; she loathed Asher's guts; being seated near him increased how irritated she was. How can such a fine boy run his mouth like he knows any better?

Always remember that a small punctuation error can change the whole meaning of a text so try to be a little careful in this aspect. Now I know that not everyone is a grammar guru, so something that we writers use to clear out this defect, is grammar checkers like Quillbot or Grammarly.

Overall, the story is one that has great potential to pique the interest of the readers and with a small change to the above-mentioned problems, it's simply going to shine!