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The Healing Bond - Detailed Feedback

Intro:

The Healing Bond was written by miiruex_. It follows several characters like Radhika and Aditya, who are doing their best to pursue their dreams in a new environment. The story takes place during their college years, meaning that not only do they have to study for their future, but they also have to discover who they are as people.

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Detailed Feedback

What Worked:

I would like to start with the small things then make my way to the bigger things, so to start, I want to say I like the presentation of your story. The title features two emotional buzzwords (Healing + Bond) and has only one weasel word (the), which is good. It's very readable and not confusing in any way with a positive word like healing, and it's short enough to appear on Google in an organized way, making for a decent SEO score. That's more of the technical stuff that helps with clicks/reads, but overall, I like the title. I also like the cover. It's cute and gives off the same vibes the core story content does, which is good to make it match. The image for the cover is cute and soft, and the font of the title is good too. Overall, good presentation.

I'm very biased since I myself am a college student, but I think you had a good match between character personalities and the setting of the story being in university. Let me first talk about the setting, then I'll delve into why I think the characters match it.

College life is a fascinating topic since many people self-destruct or make huge changes during this period. I became a professional writer in my first year of college, which was a huge life change for me. At the same time, I've never self-destructed so much before. College was, and still is since I'm not out just yet, a huge challenge that can make or break who you are. I understand my personal experience creates bias, but I think you do a good job acknowledging the hardships that come with college along with many of the emotions that a student can face, like the anxiousness and waiting to see if this life is going to break you. Those are my thoughts on the setting, so let's move into how the characters match that.

The characters match the setting due to their personalities and how they react to certain situations. There is a variety of emotions on display throughout the book, but one I want to highlight is small yet impactful: the beginning of chapter five. In the beginning of chapter five, Aditya expresses his sadness over not being able to experience sports as much in high school. One of the common emotions college students get is a longing to return to their younger, high school self. They miss the stupid drama, the pep rallies, the football games, the crappy school lunches, etc. So even though that's a small detail, I think it's an important one. Small details matter, and I'm glad you took the time to give us some, especially with the main characters.

In general, the characters all act like college kids experiencing new life events for the first time. Some of them even act like some old roommates I had, making for a more realistic take on the college genre. A lot of authors just do "party party party" without realizing how many students don't like parties, don't go to them, or only go cause they were in a mood or something similar. So having a more grounded take and seeing more sides to college outside of the whole party thing was nice. For example, us being able to see sports in the novel. The kids talk about basketball and introduce their roommates to one another. It feels mundane, but that's a good thing since too many people think college can't be mundane when it is. Sorry to disappoint anyone who thought college was just partying, but nope, it's actually pretty boring most of the time.

Similarly, there were strong themes present throughout the story, particularly with familial issues and how parents can impact the kind of person you are/the route you take in life. Kids being limited by their parents is, unfortunately, a common occurrence, especially in college where the parents practically choose their kid's field of study for them, making them miserable most of the time. It's already hard enough to be in uni, let alone studying something you never wanted to study. Those kinds of themes need to be talked about more, and I'm happy to see you decided to tackle them and show a large contrast between how the parents act for one character versus how they act for another. For sake of not spoiling it for new readers, I won't give names, so I encourage anyone reading this who isn't the author to go check out this book and find out for yourself!