Sapphire's Review Store 💙

Review by Sunshine: Face Your Demons

Title: Face Your Demons

Author: dark_as_night101

Summary: 3.5/5

Your summary, in general, is pretty great! It's definitely captivating, it introduces the voice of the main character, and it introduces the conflict. There were a few issues I found:

Firstly, your summary itself has a few run-on sentences. "I don't know maybe it's just because I don't remember them" is one of them, and I suggest adding a hyphen between the words 'know' and 'maybe'. Another one I found was: "But the people here are sketchy, they treat me like I could kill them with just one hit." In this case, while you do have a comma between the two clauses, I think a stronger piece of punctuation is needed. I would suggest using a semicolon instead of the comma.

Onto the actual contents of the summary: the shift from first person to third person is weird. Sure, the last line is a great ending hook, but it was uncomfortable to read because of the sudden perspective switch. My suggestion? Change the entire first paragraph so that it is also in third person, so that there is consistency. And the paragraph after the summary starting with Ms Dawn, which I assume is an excerpt, does not need to be there. Your initial summary already covers the points I see down there. 

Grammar: 3/5

In general, your grammar was pretty good, so well done there! I think your biggest issue was punctuation, particularly, your use of commas. Sometimes, you'd add a comma where they weren't necessary, but most of the time, there were sentences lacking commas. And I'm not talking about missing commas here and there – I'd say there was at least one comma missing per paragraph on average. Which made things very difficult to read.

My suggestion? Read your story aloud. Every time you need to pause for the writing to make sense, you need a comma. If the pause is longer, you need something stronger than a comma. That, or find yourself an editor who can pinpoint those missing commas.

Also, not so much a grammar thing, but please stop using capital letters for emphasis. It's too much. Use italics instead, to make the writing much more professional.

Final note here: in general, you clearly know your grammar rules. But the entire story needs polishing and rereading. You even spelt your own main character's name wrong – so yeah, definitely go and revise that. In general, you've got some words misspelled here and there, so I'd go back and read over very carefully. 

Character Building: 2/5

There are definitely some good things happening with characters here. I like Callie's sarcasm and her narration is quite quirky every now and then. Well done there! But there are things I would try to improve, if I were you.

Firstly, you fall into the trap of telling instead of showing a lot with characters. For example, let's think about the very beginning when you introduce Ms Dawn and the original foster parents. Don't tell us that Ms Dawn is the only one that cares for Callie – show us. What does she do? Does she, perhaps, offer Callie second-servings, or give her an extra gentle and reassuring squeeze of the shoulder when she walks past? If I had to write a character who was, let's say, very rash in decision-making, I wouldn't tell the reader that 'He was rash when it came to making decisions'. Instead, I would weave in a scenario where he immediately acts without thinking and pays for the consequences. I won't state that he is rash – I'll have him act that way.