Title: Inside Marissa's Heart (@heartofemotion )
It suits the genre.
Audience: Young adult
Genre: Romance
Initial thoughts: *cracks knuckles* I'm so late on this but let's see what's inside Marissa's heart.
haha relevant pun.
Okay sorry, on with the review.
Characters - There are quite a few named characters very early on and I had a hard time envisioning them based on the sparse descriptors given. I believe characters are supposed to be Hispanic based on their names but there weren't any other indicators.
Rosario is a masculine name, by the way. Unless that character is Italian, in which case it's feminine.
Judging by the story title, Marissa is the main character. However she doesn't get much page time in comparison to the other characters and she behaves like a selfish ten-year-old. I was told that she was upset that her brother was getting married but not why, and there aren't any scenes where she isn't totally consumed by this sulky anger towards her brother's girlfriend. I don't know who she is beyond that. I couldn't empathize with her actions because I wasn't given a reason to.
Juan and Danielle seem like a nice couple. Deeply in love and all that. Their relationship appeared healthy. And the rest of the characters are just kind of there. The brothers behave like brothers, the parents behave like happily married and concerned parents. The maids are... there. I wasn't annoyed with anyone else the way I was annoyed with Marissa but I also didn't get much of a feel for anyone else, which is shocking considering most of the page time is spent with them rather than with Marissa.
Syntax - It was fast-paced in a way that didn't leave room to build anything up. The opening paragraph was pretty and decently well written but after that it gets skeletal. There wasn't much to describe the characters or define the setting, and there was very little atmosphere. This was especially noticeable in scenes that were supposed to be exciting, like chapter three.
Technicality - Moderately decent. There were some minor mistakes; misplaced punctuation, missing words, etc.
The dialogue got really stiff because of the continuous use of full words instead of contractions.
Formatting - The art bits were cute and I didn't see any weird line spacing or the usual Wattpad shenanigans.
Final thoughts:
6/10 It's a start but it needs a lot of work.
Extra: Marissa should have been taken to the hospital for observation. Drowning victims are susceptible to hypothermia, shock, dry drowning, acute respiratory distress syndrome, and even cardiac arrest, all of which can occur several hours after the initial near-drowning. An EMT would know this and take Marissa to a hospital.
