Rebel Town Reviews [OPEN]

Shattered (Chapters 1-5) - @ronyswizzle

Shattered (Chapters 1-5) by ronyswizzle

Reviewed by AmyMarieZ 

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Overview: Shattered is a heart-wrenching story about Alexis, a young woman who is physically and mentally abused by her husband, Adrian, a man suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder. The story follows Alexis as she is shattered physically and emotionally, and then as she searches for an escape from torment.

Structure: In its current state, the story appears to be a very rough draft. The majority of the story is written in the first-person past tense, although there are a few locations where it briefly switches to third person POV. I believe these are simply errors that were missed during editing. I suspect the story may have originally been written in the third person and switched to the first person later.

I think first person narration works well for this story. So much of the story focuses on the torment that Lexi is subjected to and how she feels about it. The first-person narrative allows the story to really develop Lexi's conflicted feelings about Adrian, a man she once loved who has become her greatest nightmare. Lexi's descriptions of what being in love with Adrian was like, and then losing that love, come across strongly and the pain this young woman endures is evident.

Grammar: Since the story appears to be a very rough draft, there are many grammatical errors throughout the chapters. It appears that some of the chapters have not even been proofread. I will use this section to point out the main recurring errors I noticed that are easy fixes. Fixing the simple errors will give the story a much more polished feel and make it much more appealing to a perspective reader.

On error I noticed throughout the chapters was capitalization. In a sentence, only the first word of the sentence and any proper nouns within the sentence should be capitalized. For example, in chapter three:

Sometimes When Life Gets Hard, you wish can run away or go somewhere where no one can find you.

Should read:

Sometimes, when life gets hard, you wish you could run away or go somewhere where no one can find you.

Since "When Life Gets Hard" is not a proper noun, it should not be capitalized. I have also added in a few missing words.

Another thing I noticed was frequent missing punctuation around dialog. When a dialog tag is used, for example "he said" or "I shouted," there should be a comma after the last word of the dialog. When there is no dialog tag, there should be a period (or an exclamation point or question mark if necessary.)

For example, in chapter 2:

" Thank you rob" Taking a deep breath, I left the car and realized we were in the beach, The same beach that he promised me that he will make me the happiest woman alive but I guess he didn't keep his promise.

This sentence has a couple of errors. First, "Rob" should be capitalized because it is a name. It should have a period after it because it is dialog that is not followed by a tag. Next, "the" should not be capitalized because it is not the beginning of a new sentence. Finally, my recommendation would be to break large sentences like this into multiple sentences because they are a bit bulky and confusing to read. Here is my suggestion:

"Thank you, Rob." Taking a deep breath, I left the car and realized we were at the beach—the same beach where he promised he would make me the happies woman alive. I guess he didn't keep that promise.