Rebel Town Reviews [OPEN]

Born in Sin (Prologue - 4) - @Shadoevines

Born in Sin (Prologue - 4) by Shadoevines 

Reviewed by AmyMarieZ

----------------------

Overview: Born in Sin is an exciting romance story based in a science fiction setting and filled with tons of adrenaline pumping action. The story follows Neo, a professional thief and member of the Vaulkarian species of humanoid aliens. When his close friend Tamara guilts him into a dangerous mission—stealing military codes from the palace of the cat-like Physoldi aliens—Neo runs into more trouble than he is expecting. Not only is he in dangerous territory with The Sonar, an elusive, mysterious and dangerous group originally formed to keep peace throughout the solar system, but he also finds himself in a tight situation with the Physoldi species themselves. Love, war, emotion and suspense drive this thrilling story along!

Structure: The story is written in the past tense third person point of view. However, I was uncertain if the story was intended to be third person limited, or if it was intended to be in the third person omniscient. Each chapter seems to have one character whose POV was shown almost exclusively (except chapter 1 where the POV character switched from Tamara to Neo halfway through the chapter.) However, in most of the chapters, thoughts and perspectives were briefly shown for other characters.

My opinion is that this story could work very nicely as third person limited, switching POV characters between chapters but sticking to one character for each chapter (or in the case of chapter 1, switching halfway through but remaining consistent otherwise.) I think the intensity of each chapter would be higher if it was completely focused on what one character knows, leaving a bit more mysterious and uncertain. My suggestion would be to read through the chapters and identify the character whose view is primarily shown, and then omit or revise any parts where the perspective switches. I have left comments in the story inline noting where I noticed POV switches, so I will not reiterate the specifics here.

Grammar: Overall, the grammar of Born in Sin was well done. The story seems like it is in a first draft state, so there are a number of typos or small errors throughout. However, it seems like the author has a good grasp on sentence structure and grammar. I think with a couple of proofreads the chapters could easily be polished up. I did notice a few persistent grammatical errors/issues throughout that I'll briefly mention here.

First, I noticed that there were a number of sentences that were very long. In general, the narration showed a strong and consistent voice, however sometimes this voice had a tendency to go off on tangents. These were the points where I noticed that sentences were very long. While it is a stylistic choice, my suggestion would be to be particularly carful of the wording of these sentences, because at times they became confusing to read. I have recommended a number of places where I thought specific sentences would benefit from reconstruction inline in the story.

The other grammatical issue I noticed was with regard to dialog tags. Dialog tags are anything following dialog that directly indicates speech, for example: "he said," "I whispered," etc. When a dialog tag is used, the dialog within the quotation marks should end with a comma, and then the beginning of the tag should be lowercase unless it is a proper noun. The exception would be if the dialog ends in an exclamation point or a question mark. In these cases, a comma is not used but the tag should still be lower case. To take an example from chapter 4:

"You won't get away." Jaqueline hastily whispered up towards to man.

"Maybe not. But I gotta try, right?" He whispered back into her hair.