Cruel Reviews

I Amsterdam by winterflame168

3-9-2019

This is my 12th review and it's for I Amsterdam. Keep in mind that this review may no longer apply after a while, if the writer happens to edit their work eventually.

This is the part where I would list a few grammatical or spelling errors but the author has made none, to their credit. 

I think the first line is excellent. It's simple and it just... works.

The story is told in the first person, and as I have stated in many previous reviews, this carries a great risk, as the writing must match the talking style of the protagonist, which can render certain styles of writing and sophisticated vocabulary unusable. But because there is no dialog, the reader never feels the disconnect between it and the prose, which makes for some comfortable reading. The descriptions in this chapter are quite elaborate but they've been done well nonetheless. 

The author knows when to change to a new paragraph for impact and that takes some skill. 

The plot is simply a girl awakening in a room and looking at Amsterdam through the window, while she ponders the idea of beauty. But in no way does she relate it to herself. She has no personal thoughts about her own life. And in this way, we learn next to nothing about her, other than how moved she is by a phenomenon as common as the sunrise. Possibly, her rhetorical questions and her attempt to participate in the beauty of the dawn actually keep the reader distanced from the silence of the morning. 

This is a common mistake. The author wants the reader to feel something. And the more beautiful the words they use, the better chance they have. And that's true. But instead of writing a full chapter that way, perhaps it would at times be advisable to nudge the reader with it now and again rather than barraging them with it. Something a bit quieter can be beautiful too, especially when describing the morning. 

This chapter reads like a descriptive essay interspersed with some interesting questions pondered about beauty. On their own, the descriptions have been done very impressively. This author knows what she's doing. But as part of a story, perhaps a different approach would have been better suited.

That brings me to the end of my review. This review was for only the first chapter which was short and hence so is the review, relatively. I don't usually do this(comment on later chapters), but the writing ahead is good. GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR FUTURE WRITING winterflame168!