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The Sonic Queen (Prologue - Chapter 4) - @Wick3dClaws

The Sonic Queen (Prologue - Chapter 4) by Wick3dClaws

Reviewed by ESHurricane

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Overview

The Sonic Queen is a novel about four girls that get kidnapped as young teenagers, given powers, and are forced to become assassins. The story starts three years later when they're on a particular mission in Hawaii to expose a high profile gang while going undercover as teens at a local high school.

Cover/Title

The title, The Sonic Queen, is very enticing to me. It's very unique and punchy and definitely drew me in right away.

I didn't love the cover so much. On the surface, the shattered mirror seems like it could be a simple and hooking cover, but in practice here it just seems busy to me. It's also a bit blurry (I checked it on computer and phone just to be sure), and so at first it took me a while to figure out what I was seeing. It almost looked like a woman standing behind crumpled up cling wrap, then I realized that it was a broken mirror.

I like the idea, I just think that it's a little over edited with the blurriness and the vignetting in the corners. I feel that it could be a lot simpler to put the focus on the best part: the title. I'm not a graphic designer, but I know what I find eye catching as a viewer, so please take my suggestion with a grain of salt. But I feel like having something simpler, maybe a plain white or black background, with a small broken mirror, perhaps just in the center, with the title very large above it might be a bit more effective to me.

Summary/Description

The Summary is a bit wordy, and I think it might be punchier if it just started at the third paragraph. The author could put at the end that it's a spin off of When Snow Falls, but starting with 'Sienna Gazinski was just your average junior high girl' kind of really hits home what the book is about. The excerpt is cool, but I feel it takes away from the concise summary below.

As an aside, I checked out When Snow Falls and I noticed that this isn't exactly a spinoff as it is a retelling from a different character's perspective. I wonder if maybe it should say that in the synopsis chapter? That it's a retelling of When Snow Falls from Sienna's point of view, but still works as a standalone novel?

Hook

I love the opening line! It's powerful, it's relevant, and it's fun, which is a nice lead in because the Prologue is pretty dark stuff.

Grammar/Structure

Overall the grammar is great, just a few commas missing here or there that I pointed out inline. Spelling is impeccable! Kudos for that! There are a few instances of word rep that I would watch for (I specifically remember a paragraph with lots of 'look' and 'school').

Structurally I have a few suggestions, the first one is that I found the chapters to be very long. There are often section breaks in the chapters and I feel as though those could easily be chapter breaks instead for a bit better flow. In a paper novel they'd be a fine length but I find on Wattpad smaller chapters seem to read a bit better. Of course this is based on personal preference and anecdotes from fellow Wattpad readers, so take that with a grain of salt!

There were quite a few instances where I wasn't sure who was speaking, because the dialogue was tagged a bit oddly. For instance, Via would have an action, and then another character would speak in the same line. Or it would be her turn to be speaking but then directly after her dialogue there would be another character's action. I'd suggest trying to keep the dialogue attached to actions of the character speaking to make it less confusing as to who is speaking.