Title: In Pursuit Of (@DragonsDreaming)
Audience: New adult
Genre: Romance/Action
Initial thoughts: Looks like a spy book, how interesting.
Hook - Alright, yeah, dive right into it with a kidnapping. This story moves fast, but not so fast that it's hard to keep up with.
Characters - The characters all seem to fall into the usual spy movie tropes. You have your Regular Everyday Girl MC, your Silent Broody (love interest) Badass, even an Peppy Female Government Agent a la Garcia from Criminal Minds. Personally, I like character tropes like this. Relying on them too heavily can make a story cheap, but from what I've seen so far this story isn't in danger of that.
Syntax - As mentioned before this story starts off at a decent pace. However the writing style is a little tell-y, and it lacked atmosphere. I could tell from context that the situations the MC was thrust into were exciting but the words on the page didn't quite paint that picture. I would have like to see her interact with her environment more. Feel her shoulder pop when the van rolled, hear her kidnapper's bone crunch when she kicked him in the face, that sort of thing. The writing could also use some work on word effectiveness.
Technicality - I didn't notice anything off here; pass!
Formatting - Again, a pass. Nothing wrong and nothing fancy.
Final thoughts:
7/10 I like the characters and the idea but the writing style isn't compelling enough for me to want to read more.
Extra:
I thought it was weird that C.O.D.E.'s solution to Henley's situation was to start moving her around indefinitely rather than moving her (in the same way) with the goal of reuniting her with her family. They say right off the bat that she's high risk because she's not with her family, and it would be easier for C.O.D.E. if Henley were with her family so they could all be guarded together. It was a small detail but it popped me out of the story for a minute.
