Felicity Reviews

Review by Dio: No Strings Attached 📗

Reviewer: Dio (@of-wine-and-ecstasy)

Requester: No Strings Attached by @Strawberrynvanilla

Hi! Thank you so much for requesting a review from me! I hope I can provide some useful feedback for you. I tried my best, as you are actually my first review :] I did read up to chapter 10 of your story, so some criticisms I mention may be resolved in later chapters that I didn't get to read. If there's any problem with the review, something is unclear to you, or you'd like me to elaborate on certain points, please don't hesitate to reach out to me!

I also apologise for the wait! This ended up being longer than I expected and I've been a little busy lately, thank you for your patience!

Let's get into it!

TITLE: 4.5/5

"No Strings Attached" is a very nice and simple title. It's not terribly unique-never-seen-before, but it is intriguing, fits the genre and trope you're going for, and I see nothing you could change about it and there's nothing to complain about!

COVER: 4/5

Your cover is simple and generally very pretty! I like the colour scheme a lot, it's very simple and coherent. The image you used is high quality, and matches the genre you're going for. I do feel like the title disappears a bit, it's very thin and a little small. Perhaps you could try to use a thicker font, and make the title a bit bigger. Try playing around with fonts, colours and position of the text! Your username is very easily readable on the cover while the title fades a bit. Also, try to use fonts for title and your name that match each other a bit better to make it look more coherent!

SUMMARY: 3.5/5

Your summary starts off with a big piece of dialogue copied from your story. Some authors do this to show a little sneak peek of their book to intrigue readers. However, this doesn't work in your favour. The quote from your book you inserted is very long, and I quickly found myself scrolling past it to find out what the story is actually about.

Just like a cover, a blurb has to catch the eye of a reader and keep them interested. A reader may find themselves skimming the summary because there's just a big block of characters we don't know yet talking to each other. If you really want to include a sneak peek of the book in your summary, maybe try something that is shorter, snappier, and instantly catches the reader's interest, about one or two lines, or a single quote from a character that makes the reader want more and find out the exact context of it, or move it to the bottom of the summary instead. Personally, I would leave out that entire first part completely.

Now to the summary of the story itself. Generally it's intriguing and made me excited to read your story! It gives a good overview of what you're seemingly intending your story to be about.

What I really like is the part you added where you're sort of "advertising" your story to your reader: "Are you looking for a slight cliche, hate, betrayal [...]" I think this part is very charming, especially that you're "owning" that your story may be cliche! People who do enjoy stories like this, me included, will certainly find this addition very fun! The wording of it does seem a bit off though, like the word "story" is missing in it to make the sentence a bit more clear.

Now, I do enjoy the summary itself quite a lot. Sadly, the book itself isn't quite what the summary promised, and after having read a couple of chapters, the blurb is rather disconnected from the contents within the book, though I'll talk more in depth about this in a later section.