THE EGO REVIEW SHOP

Pain brings true love (Littie 03)

Book: Pain Brings True Love by @asthkook

Reviewer: Littie

Title: 5/5

It's definitely not a title I've seen before, which means it will be more memorable. It also brings up a very vivid mental picture, which is good.

Cover: 4/5

The cover is very pretty. The only reason I deducted a point from this is because of the improper grammar in the subtext. It reads "But who knew those two person were made for each other." It should be "But who knew those two people were made for each other?" It's an easy fix, but it throws off my first impression of the story to have a grammar mistake on the cover.

Description: 3/5

While I don't have a preference on whether a description is long or short, this one feels a bit rambly. It's not a bad description (grammatical errors aside) but it does feel like it goes on a bit longer than necessary. I'm not entirely certain what to expect from this story based on the blurb; it makes it sound like the characters JK and Areum are already together, so will this be about a new issue? Or is it actually the story of them coming together? And there's a random bit about Taehyung tossed in that confuses things a little. The author does warn about grammatical errors, so that's good they recognize that it needs some polish. Also, this is the first book the author has written, so high-five on that one! I always love seeing people put themselves out there ^_^

Grammar and Punctuation: 13/20

We were warned about the grammatical errors. This author is not a native English speaker so it doesn't come as any surprise that there are mistakes. That doesn't negate me removing points from this section; it just makes me a bit more lenient since I can't imagine that writing in another language is easy in the slightest.

One thing that I would really like to see is this author stop using so many ellipses. There's just far too many of them. When they're used on occasion, they can be a good tool for creating suspense or hesitation but using them for just about every sentence is just overkill and makes it difficult to read. That's one of the biggest reasons for a lower score in this section.

There's also some questionable word choices that can be chalked up to English not being the author's first language. I didn't worry too much about these.

That said, the spelling is great!

Plot and Storyline: 10/20

Jungkook is in love with someone who is not his wife. His marriage was arranged. At some point before the start of the story, he met Areum. She is an orphan runaway from an abusive guardian (her uncle). The story takes place three years after they've met, which is a little confusing as it first mentions a time period of eight months.

Regardless, that amount of time is an interesting point to start the story at, especially since all this background information would be interesting to actually see happen. Instead, we are fed it through random bits of internal thought from the protagonists. Sometimes these snippets of the past feel very out of place for the current happenings in the story, as if they're sort of tossed in to explain something after the fact. This has an effect on the story flow, making it feel a little disjointed, as if our narrator is easily side-tracked.

By the seventh chapter, I'm trying to figure out what the main conflict is, other than JK already being married. Since him and Areum are already together, that's not what I would consider the major conflict of the story. Every story needs a major conflict, and it needs to be introduced within the first couple chapters if you want to keep the attention of the reader. Eventually we find out that her uncle keeps trying to come after her, which appears to be the main conflict. As far as conflicts go, that's a good one to use given Areum's past.