I like the mystery behind the title, it felt fitting and unfitting at the same time, however the full story wasn't really updated so it was hard to say if it's fully fitting hence the half mark.
Cover : 7/10
The cover looks great! It caught the ambience and tone of the story. The only complains I have is that the picture used is somewhat blurry and the font used for the subtitle is horrid. It's next to unreadable and a little too small. Otherwise your cover looks great.
Blurb : 8/10
The blurb is both intriguing and engaging. I like the description and the quotes and it really is a job well done.
First Impression : 4/5
My impression of the story as soon as I opened it was good. I really like that it was a reader story, yet she at least had a name instead of you going y/n, but that is just a personal preference.
Plot : 8/20
The plot was hardly unique, mafia fanfics are overdone and I don't think you can change that. The plot twists I saw coming from the start. However my major problem with the plot is that despite constantly moving forward there didn't have a high stakes feeling to any of it. The pacing felt a little too rushed, yet not at the same time. The plot moves at a really flat line, there was fluctuation in the plot at all.
I'm not sure how else to explain this.
Yes, there were stakes and her bff getting kidnapped was high stakes, yet the way it was written, the purple prose were all just distracting and I didn't feel the high tension at all. Actually the tension of that moment was not captured even the slightest bit. Aura's reaction to her best friend getting kidnapped, Yoongi's reaction to him losing his charge were all just inhuman and way off. There was no capturing of the heart-breaking emotion at all. Which in turn made the whole pace of the plot feel both rushed and fall flat.
Flow : 5/10
The flow of the story was smooth, but as I explained in the plot section, fell rather flat. A key element in making a story flow smooth and natural is emotion. It wasn't that you lacked the usage of the five senses, but rather it wasn't written well. Your characters barely reacted to anything, you barely showed their emotional reaction.
Which takes me to the show a story, don't tell it aspect, but we'll touch on that a little later.
Grammar and Vocabulary : 6/10
Your grammar and grip on words are good, the reason I had to cut marks is because you write in purple prose.
Emotion : 2/10
The emotional depiction was zero to none. Here is a problem, I can't deduce if the reason the emotion didn't really come out is your writing style or because you don't convey the emotion at all, because it wasn't for the lack of word use. You have a vast vocabulary, so my conclusion is that the way you write is what is making the emotion not come out.
Character Development : 4/10
For the characters to have development throughout the story, they should be flesh out first. Sure, they had back stories and half a personality, but none of them were relatable nor did they fit the role they played. For example, Yoongi is supposed to be a mafia, someone intimidating, yet he came off to me as rather soft and a little too friendly for a bodyguard.
Chaeyeong was... to be extremely honest she felt like a piece of wood that talks, her character was probably the least fleshed out and she was a kind of important person in the story. Her father is the one who hired Yoongi to protect her, yet he galivants everywhere with Aura and hardly ever watches his actual charge. Sure, he may have others staying with her, but if he is the main body guard, then everyone else should be with Aura and Yoongi should be with Chaeyeong.
I didn't get that at all.
Furthermore was Aura's and Yoongi's reaction when they learned Chaeyeong was kidnapped or more so to see the carnage left behind. Yoongi simply disappeared from the scene and Aura barely had a reaction to seeing all that blood. Yes, she reacted, but her reaction was the barest of bare minimum someone would react to seeing a masacre.
Adding to this how soon they found Chaeyeong, how unprofessional it was of Yoongi to not even inform her father and take Aura with him to rescue her, the entire rescue scene and all of their reaction to Matte. This all goes to show just how unthought the character development is. And as i said, there was nothing to begin with for the characters to develop throughout the story.
Writing Style : 1/10
This, this is where you are going completely wrong. I'm really sorry to be the one to tell this, but your writing style is horrible. Just really bad. And it has nothing to do with either your grammar, sentence structure or vocabulary. It has something I've been alluding to under every category. Purple Prose.
Just to make it clear, purple prose is a flowery or exaggerated way of writing This is something that works for poetry but hardly ever for prose - or novels, stories.
Frankly put, purple prose is too flowery to make sense and is something that is advised to be avoided at all costs, unless you know what you are doing. Not only is it messy, it is exaggerated to the point that the writing hardly makes sense.
Your grasp of this writing style is good, everything you had written made perfect sense and that really is a good accomplishment. But writing the whole story in metaphors is a ride that no one is gonna sign up for. I think the main reason your writing came off as both emotionless and senseless is this very fact. Reduce the usage of purple prose for character descriptions, setting and background, but even then keep it to three to four sentences a para and that's it, don't even over do purple prose as it is hard to read and not everyone is going to be well-versed in english to understand the metaphors.
Reader's Enjoyment : 3/5
As this is a place for personal opinion I will tell you that I did enjoy the story. I just hoped the characters had been more relatable to or better yet, behaved a bit more human than characters in a book. AS distracting as the purple prose was, for someone who can understand, it was a good read.
Overall : 2/5
Total : 53/100
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
