In My Opinion

How Hearts Mend by Amashavi

Full title: How Hearts Mend by Amashavi
Source: Review request
Genre: Romance
Subgenre: Chicklit
Mature: Y (infidelity, mention of suicide, non-explicit sexual content, strong profanity)
Status: Ongoing
First impressions: 38/40
Digging deeper: 95/100
Final thoughts: pending

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*****

First impressions total: 38/40

Title: 10/10
Great title. It conjures up images of deep emotion, pain, and healing, so it could work for a romance or a general fiction story, depending on how that healing occurs.

Story description: 10/10
Do you know how rare it is for me to give a perfect score in this category? No SPAG errors, perfect balance of info and mystery, great hook—you've got it all down pat. You've set the stage for Cassy's healing and rediscovery in Italy with food and romance. I'm in! The only suggestion I could make here is potentially cutting Pete Murphy's name from the first sentence, so Cassy's name goes first, since it sounds like Pete won't feature too much in the story after his indiscretion.

Cover: 10/10
This is a gorgeous cover. Having the Tuscan imagery within the couple's silhouette is such a neat idea, and the shades of sunrise or sunset work well with the idea of mending a heart—ending a chapter (sunset) and beginning a new one (sunrise). The font and placement of the title is perfect, and your name fits so neatly and perfectly in the space between the faces.

First chapter (and everything that came before it): 8/10
Hi Loves: Hi! This is pretty informal, which is fine for an author's note, but I just wanted to point out a few things in case they become an issue later in the story. There are a couple of missing apostrophes in contractions, a capitalized word midway through a sentence, and you should hyphenate "self-discovery."

Character aesthetics: Ooh, pretty. Maybe I should attempt character aesthetics, eventually. ...nah. I'll just hire somebody to do them, if I decide to try that out. 😉

Chapter 1: This is a good first chapter. It really shows Cassy's good mood and builds up her hope and happiness, along with this underlying sense of foreboding that something is about to go wrong, so the revelation about Pete and her boss is not necessarily unexpected, but it still hits the reader hard. You also show her shock and rising rage really well, as well as her gradual cooling down while she walks and reflects on the situation. And then the surprise and humor of someone basically attacking her because they think she's about to jump to her death—really, really well done. All the feels, from the highs of happiness to the lows of betrayal to the surprise of the unknown.

As far as editing suggestions, you slip into the present tense rarely, so just keep an eye out for that. Keeping everything in the past tense for consistency is important. In the first sentence of the story, there's a missing period in that dialogue, and later, there's a semicolon with an extra space in front of it. You also have a tendency to overuse commas, which I recognize, because I do it, too.

Hyphens seem to give you a little trouble. When you hyphenate a sentence, you usually need a pair of hyphens, one on either side of the phrase you're setting apart. Also, don't capitalize the word that comes right after a hyphen, as it's still part of the same sentence before the hyphen.

There's some awkward phrasing here or there, usually because it's a little wordy (again, a problem I can relate to). For example: "On this day, it was a really rare situation because it was that one of her bosses at the Regal - Ms. Francesca Moretti, to everybody's surprise, had gone home early by herself." This is missing the paired hyphen, but it's just a little clumsy. Rearranging and condensing helps: "To everybody's surprise, Ms. Francesca Moretti, one of her bosses at the Regal, had gone home early." You don't have to say something about it being a "rare situation," because that's implied by everybody's surprise, and I left out "by herself" because that's implied, too. If you didn't rephrase that way, the missing hyphen would go after "Ms. Francesca Moretti."