Gemstone Reviews [Closed for Catch up]

Review #23-Kaleidoscope

Title: Kaleidoscope

Author: Blackaddictz

Genre: Short story

Rating: None

# of chapters: 1

# of chapters I read: 1

Summary/blurb:

A nuanced sky

A melting sun

A golden evening

A charcoal night

A chromatic abstract

A prismatic mosaic

A colourful painting

An incandescent photograph

A kaleidoscopic life

Review:

Cover:

The moment I added this book to my reviews reading list, I knew I'd have something to say about the cover. Why isn't there an actual kaleidoscope on it? What I'm seeing right now is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It just looks like you chose a random 'starry night' background and slapped a title onto it (which let me add, is blurry, as is the author's name). I'm not sure whether you did it out of irony or not, but I'm not seeing it.

Overall—Put an actual kaleidoscope on your blurb or call your collection of short stories "A charcoal night."

Blurb:

This is the first time I review a collection of short stories, but even then, I'm not given any indication as to what the overarching theme is. What I'm getting, instead, is a poem, which doesn't tell me anything. I mean, it's beautiful and all, but still; I'm not sure about what kind of short stories I'm meant to expect.

So I took a peek inside—thinking that maybe each story revolves around a line of the poem, e.g. story 1 is about 'a nuanced sky—but then I was given yet another poem, which makes me think that you have placed this in the wrong category. If the rest of this book is going to be filled with poetry, I suggest you put this in the poetry genre.

Other than that...I don't really have much to say. At first, I thought that for some of the lines, you correlated the wrong adjective to the noun. For example, I looked at "a prismatic mosaic" and thought, "Isn't a mosaic 2D what does it have to do with prisms?" But to save you from my ignorance, I looked up "prismatic" and saw that it also means "rainbow". So a colorful mosaic. Noice.

Overall—Put this is in the right category.

First Impression:

I'll tell you straight up that I don't write poetry, nor do I ever read any. I've had a horrible experience in high school where I was forced to analyze poetry by the defunct Irish poet Seamus Heaney—most of his poems revolved around potato crops and the farm life, which I personally found very boring. So this is kind of a challenge for me—so take this review as my miserable two cents.

I'm going to work through this first impression the same way I did just last year. In parts.

1. Theme—The poem clearly revolves around colors and the emotions we associate with them. Or at least, this is your interpretation. When it comes to sadness, a lot of people see the color blue as its visual representation, while others associate it with serenity and peacefulness. Black is usually associated with death and loss, so I found it interesting that you correlated sadness to it as the overall emotion. It's not wrong—there are no right or wrong interpretations.