J's Reviews [closed to catch up]

#28: The Doughnut Shop

First Impressions
I'm one of those people who unfortunately does judge a book by its cover, or more importantly, the writer. A brilliant book cover gives the impression that the writer is serious about their work and that they want you to read it. A bright and eye catching design will help you to bring in reads. But when a book doesn't have a good cover, it can give the impression that the writer is either overconfident, they think their book is so good that any old cover, no matter how bad, will do, or that they don't care. I am pleased to say HurricaneKareena  fits into the first category. The cover is bright and eye catching and clearly lets me know that this writer wants me to read her book.

The blurb isn't quite as good as the cover. I feel there is a lot of information in the blurb that could probably be left until the start of the story, such as the fact the main character Ethan Chen is the super genius of his school. It's very school work heavy, which I think could possibly be a turn off for potential readers. Think about it, you've been at school all day, you're tired and want a good book to read, would you really want to read a book where school work features heavily in the blurb?

The Character Introduction Page
I'm hoping you've read one of my reviews before. If you have then you won't be surprised when I say I can't stand character introduction pages or aesthetics pages, as to be honest with you, I don't see the point in them. I mean they're pretty, but what a reader wants is a writer to describe their characters with words instead of looking at pictures. In published books, these pages don't or shouldn't exist.

Introduction
It's cute. But I don't think it's really needed. You can't really tell your readers how they should feel about a character, so saying don't judge them, isn't really going to work. People will either love your characters, or hate them, but that's life and you can't please everyone. Again, someone may really love this book and others may not. The most important advice I can give you is to understand that you can't please everyone.

Chapter One
Finally! The first chapter. I feel I've gone through quite a few pages until I got to this point and I'm a little bit concerned that writers may decide not to read this if there's too many other pages before they get to the actual story.

The chapter title here is brilliant. It's catchy and unique and really goes well with the theme of the story.

What all books need to do is hook the readers in with the first line and first paragraph of the story. By starting the first chapter with a line of simple dialogue doesn't make for a very good hook. It's great for tv shows, soap operas and teen dramas, but i really wouldn't use dialogue to start a story. I can't help feeling there are better ways of introducing characters rather than have them in school as I am beginning to feel it's drifting a little bit.

When you change the scene from the first class to the next class, I don't think there is any need to put **** as there are better ways to move from one to another. I feel you have skipped over something that could have been really fun to include in this chapter if you were to keep it set within the school, and that is the part where they are evacuated after what I can assume is because of an explosion.

The end of the chapter is where I think this should have started from, right where the story starts. We don't need to know about someone's rather typical sounding school day, not when the story is about teenagers trying to save their favourite hangout. Describe the bakery, show the readers the important setting, instead of all the school stuff. For me, as a 28 year old woman from the U.K. I'm afraid it doesn't really interest me, but I think I would have been more interested in it if it had started right where the Bakery is going to close.

The only thing I have learned from reading the first chapter is you have two characters, Ethan and Tweed, who are in a relationship and they're at school. I don't feel any of the school stuff is needed.

Unfortunately I have decided to stop reading here. However, I wish you well with it for the future.

My Advice
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