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: I love the heart and the message behind this story. The story of hope and recovery always has room in my heart and well, this story hits the exact spots. It's light and is able to tackle the themes it did with extreme care, dexterity, and a good perspective. The characters all have their agency and are quite real to me, which is always an added bonus. The plot moves along at a steady pace and I was able to enjoy the overall feel of the story.
What didn't work: The only point I would be touching in here is the technical side of things. I can see the point and the big picture of the story but the way it's executed was a little sloppy. There are points in the book where I skimmed entire blocks of text because the gist could be told in at most four sentences. There are instances of character sentiments being repeated over and over again.
The amount of telling is also distracting to a fault and I felt like the story was just hurrying me along instead of letting me immerse into the scene. The presentation and flow of the scenes could also use some work. Some of them are done in a sloppy manner and there are some transitions that confused me for a long while. The time skips are also a bit disconcerting and I felt like after every time skip, everything was just kinda info-dumped on me.
Lastly, this story is divided into two parts but I felt like the latter part was somehow detached from the first one, resulting in somewhat disjointed pieces.
What to improve: Definitely those points above. I would suggest avoiding huge paragraphs and learning to splice them according to their main idea to avoid overloading the reader. You need to give them the space to breathe. I promise it would do wonders to the way your narrative flows.
Another useful skill to have in writing is knowing when to tell and when to show. There are many google articles to tell you how to use both of these narrative techniques to help in the execution of your story.
For the transition of scenes, I would suggest going back to your outline or whatever and highlighting points of conflict in each chapter. Try to structure your chapters in a way that they have a beginning, a middle, and a gripping end that would hook your readers into reading the next parts. Leave enough questions to be answered by the latter chapters as well. There are many google articles about this.
As for the info-dump, it requires certain dexterity to be able to dump stuff into the reader without them feeling like they're being info-dumped. There are many google articles about this and my DMs are open (in both Wattpad and Discord) if you want more clarifications.
In conjoining the two halves of the story and making them feel like a whole part, I would suggest a thorough structural and developmental edit. Maybe have Elena's recovery be a pivotal plot point in the second half. Maybe there need to be more scenes of Elena helping the children in Syria deal with their own grief and stuff to fully utilize the weight and momentum of the first half. There are many directions the second half could take and I would have loved to see it not rushed and cut short. ;-;
Finally, this story has a spattering of punctuation errors, pronoun vagueness, typos, and redundant phrases and paragraphs. Nothing a good line edit wouldn't fix, though. And I suggest doing the structural edits first before obsessing over grammar and punctuation.
Final verdict: This is a 7/10 on my scale. A good story with enough heart and a positive message about hope and getting better, I admit it has become my mini-therapy for the last couple days. Thank you for this uplifting story and I wish you luck in your writing journey. Keep writing. Keep telling honest stories. You're almost there. :))
