Risa's Review Shop

°REVIEW 18: MELODY°

Genre: teen fiction
Author: botronny
Number of chapters read: five
Trigger warnings: none so far

A mini review
Star rating: 🌟🌟

°🌼°

A number of things can steal one's happiness.

Risa's summary: for Melody, these things include: severe anxiety and trauma.
Time runs by, and Melody decides to make the changes needed to relieve her pain.
She'll make a list, and she'll accomplish all she's put in it by Christmas Eve.
With her determination, it's a great start.
But with hidden truths ready to creep up at any minute, Melody can only hope for a great finish.

"Let's get this done, Melody!"
That sentence rang loud in my head as I made my way through the first few paragraphs. Melody's list got me quite excited; I enjoy being part of a character's journey.
I had a nice time with this book.

However, I also had certain issues that made it very hard to force myself through each chapter. Of course, these are only my opinions, a ton of people would read this book and have no issues at all.

First off, there was sooo much going on in the first chapter -- to me, at least. It seemed like the author was trying to squeeze in all there was to know about the MC.
I felt beaten to a pulp.
It started with Melody's decision to set goals she hoped to accomplish. After that, a brief exposition on her haphephobia was given. After that, I traveled back in time to witness an experience which left Melody traumatized. After that, I got introduced to her family -- Sira, Callum, Becky, Lucky, and her mum. After that, Melody told me about her anxiety. After that, she spoke about the question of her identity. After that, I could go on but I've got a few other issues to discuss.

With descriptions, a commendable effort was made. Grammar was also pretty decent, there were errors here and there but nothing a good edit wouldn't fix quickly.

Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.
In my opinion, there's much to be worked on in this area. Especially, I found chapter two bothersome. To help, I'll leave two primary tips:

• Meaningless conversations are a threat to a good story. If the discussion being held does not serve plot/character development in any way, you might want to leave it out.

• It isn't advisable to use dialogues as a means of dumping information you think the reader should know.

I really loved the book's summary! The book's cover, though, I found very unsatisfactory.

The originality of this piece is piercing, and I sense the author's creative stream reaches very far. For these reasons, I'll love to read Melody again when it's been polished, as I hope it'll be a spectacular read with five stars.

🌼 Risa Quill 🖋️

botronny, please let me know what you think of this mini review.