Pokémon Book Reviews

Individual Review of Crossover by Tealken

(NaivEevee)

One of the first things I noticed about Crossover was the fluid, smooth vocabulary used to tell the story. It's a feature that puts the fanfic at a more advanced level—not many fanfic writers can execute the wording of their descriptions and actions as well as you did in your story.

I also loved the beautiful comparisons and vivid imagery language you used. While they were refreshing to read, I found that those details did lack clarity.

For example:

"A wide, blue canopy speckled with fluffy white."

Though this is a wonderful description of the sky, it does not explicitly state that it is actually the sky anywhere, which may confuse some readers. This is something that I noticed to be more prominent in your story; sometimes, it may be easier on the reader to just directly state what is happening rather than expecting the reader to understand your elaborate descriptions as a whole.

On that note, I found this same issue in dealing with your characters. Ara and Keith are both wonderfully distinguished characters, but the constant usage of "blank" dialogue and alternating pronouns makes it confusing for me personally as to who is really speaking.

Essentially, you have a lot of these:

"Hello."

"How are you?"

"Good," he said.

"That's nice," she said,

Does this make sense? I recommend adding some actions/movement, visual descriptions, or some adverbs to fully flesh out more of your characters' personality. It also helps to spice up your dialogue. Be sure to clarify who's speaking as well.

Sample:

"Hello!" Dust chirped as he sprang up and flapped his wings.

"Good afternoon," Pop replied energetically to her companion.

Overall, I thought that the story was very engaging, especially in the beginning with Ara and Keith's chase—I just love it when books are able to capture a reader's interest right away with a hooking intro! Your story beginning is a great example. The story lost some of that excitement as I read on, however. As I continued into the chapters, there was a lot of back and forth talking that felt forcedly placed. It was as though you were trying so hard to familiarize the reader with your characters; the dialogue just didn't seem as casual or relevant anymore. The story direction was essentially lost, and I believe that the issue I discussed above might have contributed to this. I do see some major improvement following past the third chapter, but this story was incomplete when I first started reading, and so those chapters were not reviewed.

One last thing I'd like to mention though! I would definitely refrain from overly-long and "talkative" author's notes. I find this very typical of average fanfics, and it's also very unprofessional. Not only that, I don't believe most readers would really care to read them. It's a huge takeaway from the book if you start talking about why/ how you did what you did in a story. If you are a writer, I believe that you need to be confident and trust your abilities to write a piece that the readers can understand alone without you being there justify your story flaws.