Gemstone Reviews [Closed for Catch up]

Review #36-Keeping Secrets

Title: Keeping Secrets

Author:BeccaAndCarly

Genre: Teen Fiction/Romance

Rating: PG, but I feel like the more into the story it will be PG-13.

# of chapters: 5 (ongoing) 

# of chapters I read: 2

Summary/Blurb: 

This is a guide, that will help you through your life. Help you learn from the mistakes I've made as a teenager. The lies I keep up. Sure, my life was good at first. Lying was easy, but with a huge secret..it just gets harder and harder.

Use this guide to learn from my wisdom as a college student. Sure, I'm not the brightest. That would be Rider. Everyone gets wisdom from living life. I sure have been living life, just the wrong way....

Review:

Cover:

This looks a lot like the cover for a diary, and the title fits it. I like the ornamental design you used, I've seen it on hardcopy books before (and drapes), but the pink in the corners and around the center doesn't really sit right with me. It makes it blatantly obvious that this cover has been made digitally. What you should try to go for is a cover that really emulates the one of a college student's diary. It has to look like it's been thumbed through a lot, doodled on, the title has to look like it was written in pen...etc. Basically, try to imagine how your protagonist would keep a journal because the way it looks like is reflective of their personality and way-of-life.

Blurb:

I'm not a fan of blurbs in the first person because you miss out on a lot of information which can only really be told through the third person perspective. Like in this case, I don't even know what the protagonist's name is, and it doesn't really make m want to find out either. Here's why:

This is supposed to be some kind of 'guide' to survive life, but it's written by a college student...what kind of life advice can a 20-year-old give you? They still have their whole lives in front of them! If it was an 80-year-old lady, that has lived life to the fullest and is now spending her retirement writing a memoir, then that would be much more interesting. Elderly people rarely admit to having done rebellious/naughty things, especially in the presence of the younger generations, so when you do find out what Grandma Nora did back in 1952, you remain shocked for life. You thought that all she did was bake cookies and knit sweaters? Think again.

But the protagonist keeps talking about how she lived life the wrong way, lied, etc., but it's all very ambiguous. What bad things could she have done? Snort cocaine, cheat on someone, party hard...? Like there's nothing unusual there (unless she killed a man, then things start getting interesting) that I haven't seen before in other stories, and nothing about it really hooked me as a potential reader.

Overall—Meh. I suggest that you rewrite this blurb, use the third person perspective, and spice things up a bit. 

First Impression:

*cracks fingers* Let's get started, shall we?

The first part (the one before the break) seemed disjointed from the rest of the chapter. I didn't quite get the point of it except for being an attempt to create sympathy for the protagonist. The issue is, I've been told several times in the blurb that the girl is harboring this life-changing secret and it's repeated a million times here as well. It gives too much of the story away and is practically a (vague) summary of the plot. I rather see for myself how she "kept her loved ones safe from her past", rather than being told that she did so in the beginning.