GRA Reviews And Requests

Terry's Pokemon Adventure by drummerman88

Honestly, I don't know where to start with this book. I thought it was poorly written, unoriginal, and unrealistic. In short, it was kinda trashy. I do believe there were some parts that showed your potential as a writer, but the book itself was kind of a lost cause. Now as the majority of this review will probably be negative, I'm going to start out with some parts of the book I found decent.

The Good

The Opening

Your intro, at first glance, honestly made me want to hand this book over to someone else. But after a second time reading it, I realized he was speaking to the professor, not the reader. Honestly though, I think your opening would have been better in 3rd person, as it would have given you a chance to describe Terry and the scene he was in. Something like,

A boy, standing at the height of any average male his age, blew his long brown bangs out of his eyes before introducing himself to the man standing in front of him. "Hi, my name's Terry and I'm ready to start my Pokemon adventure."

The Fighting Scenes

Another decent aspect of the book were the fighting scenes. Of course, they could have been way better, but there were worse things about the book than half-baked fighting scenes.

I'm the last one to give pointers on how to conduct battle scenes, but izayoix has some of the most vivid descriptions I've ever read. I highly suggest checking her out.

The Evil Team, and Boss

I really liked the twist about the evil organization and its originality. It's name was, "Bottle Rocket," and the idea of grunts not having any memory of their purpose and what they were assigned to do was refreshing. I liked how they were actually a terrorist group. And they didn't use Pokemon! How interesting......wiiiiiith a lack of elaboration. Disappointing. Also, the idea of an evil Gardevoir who could talk and believed Pokemon were superior to humans was a great start, unfortanetly, since you didn't elaborate it became half of what it could have been.

Diance and Terry

The little part about them being able to share dreams and how it saved Terry's life in the end was something I hadn't seen before, especially since I thought it was going to turn out to be a pointless detail in the plot.

The Bad

I'm not going to divide this into sections, because I want to keep this short. Your book sucked. Sorry, but that's all there is to it.

It took me a week to read this 10 chapter book, while I've read decent, lengthy 30 chapter books in little over 3 hours. I simply had no desire to read it.

Something that upset me off was how it was so unrealistic. He did not accidentally toss a pokeball into the air and by chance catch FREAKING MEW!! And Diancie just magically knew Terry was the right person to ask for help. I'm not going to even touch on the whole, "Trainer meets a legendary who can enable them to understand Pokemon," because I find it annoying and unoriginal. I'd settle for only the legendary being able to talk, but only telepathically please! Or just get rid of the legendary in general!

Your formatting needs some major work. If one character speaks, and another one speaks right after, you need to begin a new paragraph. For instance:

"Jam sucks, I love the delicious, succulent treat called ham," Pam said, taking a bite of the meat in question as she spoke.

"No, ham is just glorified animal by-products!" Ham growled back.

In the words of the great critic, Sheare, "Think of it like a steak. Do you want to chop it up into tiny pieces, or swallow the whole thing?"

Your cover looks like the artistry of a ten year old with potential. Except that potential doesn't belong as the cover of a book. And your description was actually 1 sentence. Everything else was a disclaimer. Huge turn-off.

The last thing I want to touch upon is how the book progressed. I had to go back and re-read parts that didn't make sense. Like when Terry told Charky about his shared dreams with Diancie. Charky then goes to say, "Sharing a dream scape is nothing to be ashamed of." ????? That left me confused. They seemed boastful about their new power if anything.

The final verdict I give to this book is a 3.5(according to the GRA grading scales) Take some writing classes, read decent pieces. The Pokemon Watties has reading lists of the winning books for each category each year. Once again, I highly suggest you check them out.