Gemstone Reviews [Closed for Catch up]

Review #5-The Other Girl

Title: The Other Girl

Genre: Teen Fiction

Author: littlewhims 

Rating: PG

# of Chapters: 13 (Ongoing) 

# of Chapters I've read: 2

Summary/Blurb: 

There's the story about Kimberly Morgan, the average girl who's decently pretty, perhaps smart, and most definitely a naive virgin.

Then there's the story of Stella Reyes. The girl who's so perfect, so admirable, and so enviable that she never gets a voice in the average story about the everyday girl who gets her prince and lives happily ever after.

This is story of Stella Reyes, the other girl, and how her life changes when another girl appears--an average girl.

Review:

Cover [Has been updated, so this observation no longer applies]: 

The cover is very...Tumblr. The font, the image, everything about it reminds me of the site and its aesthetics. For those of you who don't use Tumblr, some posts basically entail in picking a random image and overlaying a dramatic block of text, usually from song lyrics, or a movie. So it could be a picture of rain, and then the text could be "Can't stop thinking about you." The two things are completely disconnected, but who cares? It looks visually appealing.

Now, while that would work to get thousands of notes on a blogging site, it doesn't really do it for me here. It makes me wonder: what does a girl standing in a museum and fiddling with her phone have to do with the story? I mean, yes, of course she'll be on her phone at some point (21st century, y'all) but the fact that it's on the cover—she looks disinterested, and I'm unsure about whether this is a candid shot, or if she was posing.

She looks bored and the dullness of the entire ensemble can ward off readers—I myself would have glossed over this and moved on to the next book.

My suggestion is to get a cover that is more upbeat, more appealing to the eye. The genre is Teen fiction for heaven's sake! I want to think about being young, wild, and free, not old, depressed, and saggy! Take a look at the other covers, make a note of a common theme, and try to incorporate that in your own cover.

Overall— I'm getting down in the dumps just looking at this. Get a new cover!

Blurb:

I want to be frustrated, I really do, but I can't because you're relatively new to the game and don't know how to play. However, I must be 100% honest with you—I've seen hundreds of stories with similar blurbs and storyline.

We have the Mary Sue character (pretty/virgin/antisocial/intelligent) and the super annoying preppy/bitchy/dumb cheerleader that rules the school and spits on nerds. I keep seeing the words "average" , "perfect", "girl" and my eyes keep rolling back into my head, I'm practically risking going blind from reading this.

I can see what you're trying to do, turning the tables. The story is about Stella the queen, and not Kimberly the plain Jane—reminds me of that movie called Happily N'Ever After, about how the villains in fairy tales (e.g. Wicked stepmother) are sick of not having their own"happily ever after" and hence try to fight the good guys about it. Evil ends up getting its ass kicked back to Loser Town, and Good triumphs yet again.

It's a nice take on the cliché, but if you want me to buy it, you need a blurb that's more captivating than that. There's a lot of repetition—I get it, Kimberly is average and Stella is a star, I don't need that point hammered into my brain any more than it already is.