This book is for the reviews of the stories submitted to via the now-obsolete Pink Alpaca Reads. Beware: honest opinions ahead.
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What I loved: The premise of this story is good as well as the overall plot. I like how the ending isn't all cupcakes and rainbows and just...realistic. I love the tension, the fluff, and the diversity. I love the MC's sass and the humor mixed inside the narrative. I also love how distinct the MC's voice is and that is proven during the POV shift.
What didn't work: It's the pacing for me. On a plot-level scheme of things, I feel like there are some scenes that could be cut off because they're just a replay of the previous scenes. Case in point: the MC's and Isha's tirades against each other. It happened too many times in the story and they aren't saying anything new that the reader wasn't already aware of by the first iteration of the scene. So, yeah, revisit the story and assess if you really need that lot of iteration to be able to get to your point.
Another point is the telling of emotions. That kind of killed the description of the MC's internal turmoil because of being placed inside the characters' shoes, we're just told that they feel this and that. That's def something to look into in your edits or in your new stories to make your narrative and prose stronger.
What to improve: One of the things I can suggest is the overall flow and coherence of the paragraphs. In a technical sense, some of the sentences are clunky and sound grating to the ears (read: brain). There are instances of words being repeated again and again as well as feelings, metaphors, or even phrase. Def focus on this to end up with a more polished manuscript. uwu.
Ease up on the metaphors, as well, with the MC's voice tinged with sass. I know that the narrative is that way because it's the character's voice but it does become stale and overbearing by the middle part of the story. Some of these metaphors are direct iterations of stuff said before and some are just placed one after the other that there is no sentence variety anymore.
There are a lot of resources on Google about getting rid of these common errors. You can start on sentence variety, paragraph flow, and showing vs. telling.
Final verdict: This is 8/10 on my scale since it does most of the heavy-lifting with the story it's telling and I think it's actually a heartfelt tale of best friends falling in love and the reality of dreams vs. love in our life. You've got a good story in your hands. Keep writing and keep shining. uwu.
