Gemstone Reviews [Closed for Catch up]

Review #16-A Tough Life

Title: A Tough Life

Author: My_life32

Genre: TeenFiction

Rating: PG-13

# of chapters: 14 (ongoing)

# of chapters I read: 2

Summary/Blurb: 

"I can't just sit here while she's out there scared and alone." I told him grabbing a gun from the shelf.

"Asha, you can't just always put yourself in danger." Blaylen said turning me to him.

"They have my sister Blaylen." I told him looking right in his eyes.

I push around him going over across the room. I grab some more bullets and checking the gun. I stash the bullets in my pocket and the gun in my waste band. I made my way over to the door with only one thing on my mind......

" Asha!" Blaylen yelled my name.

I turn my head to face him "What?"

"Remember, you can't go anywhere without me."

Review:

Cover:

Hmm...I actually found myself ruminating over this cover because there's usually something that just jumps out at me right away and makes me either like it or hate it , but I found that it wasn't the case with this cover. I like how simple it is, and I find the title a little ironic in some respects—from the summary you've given me, the story talks about a princess, so how tough can her life be? But then from the book excerpt (blurb section) she's holding a gun like she's ready to fill someone up with bullets. My only suggestions for this would be to make sure the image is large enough for the cover, because it's blurry, and maybe choose a different font for the title. I feel like it's a little too plain—it's either the image or the title, not both.

Overall—Pleasant.

Blurb:

I'm all for book excerpts in the blurb (I have one myself for one of my works), but not when it's the only thing present. Taken out of context, the characters and dialogue have no substance and hence doesn't mean anything to me. I do admit that it's pretty badass (disregarding the grammatical errors), but you need to put in some info regarding the characters mentioned in it to make it compelling.

The way it currently is, it will give potential readers the wrong impression about you as an author—that you're too lazy to write a blurb and hence resorted to the excerpt. In reality, you may not know how to write one (and hence preferred to not write one at all instead of writing a bad one), but this isn't the message that is conveyed. But that's alright, that's why I'm here; to help you with that!

So you gave me a brief summary of the story in the form:

"Asha Oliver is the princess of Venetia. The oldest of her three siblings. Follow Asha in her journey of becoming into the crown."

That's already a good start. All you have to do is expand on this and tell us a little more about Asha—later you should even talk about Blaylen since he's mentioned in the excerpt.

Overall—No blurb, just an excerpt. If it's hard for you to write one (I know I do) start a thread in the Improve Your Writing Club with a relatively developed summary of your story, and people will most likely come over and help you out.

Now, for the story! 

First Impression:

I flip the page and bam, I'm hit with the blurb! I suggest that you put this in the actual section for it, at the front of the book, right underneath the excerpt.