The Nigerians Books Award 2020(CLOSED)

The reviews for the remaining teen fiction Books 🇳🇬🇳🇬

Hello Nigerians!!!

Most of the teen fiction participants were curious; what happened to their book?

Where did they go wrong?

How were their books judged?

We want to assure you all, that you are all great writers.

Everyone will compete but only one will win but that must not stop you from writting.

🇳🇬 Behind the gate of Lakeview by
Rihanna_Adedeji

1. Title: 5 --Your title is kind of unique. It pops a question. What is behind the gate of Lakeview? Intrigued is the word. Though, I don't know why I thought it would be something mysterious, but yh, it's good.

2. Book cover: 6 -- It's fair and Nigerian enough. Though it could be better. The school students already give a secondary school vibe, so I know what to expect, considering it centres around the Lakeview school. But, the other sentences and little words apart from the title are not clear enough to see, some are blending with the uniforms; that is the color. The sentences disappear around the corner so we don't see the full thing. You lost some marks because of this.

3. Book description: 8 -- I'm impressed with it, simply put. I would actually want to read the book. Debate club, head girl, Golden boy as a rival? Who wouldn't? It'd surely be an interesting read. There were some punctuation errors though.

4. Opening line: 7--I decided to go with Chapter 1 since some people don't read prologues. But I'd like to point out that in your "prologue", you shouldn't just start listing your characters and their attributes. It's information dumping. I'd easily forget (I did), you should introduce them as the story goes, where they pop up and are needed. Where they have a role to play. Your opening line or rather, paragraph, was just okay. Not bad and not the best you can produce either. Jade is introducing us to her new life and what she thinks of it, so that's a win for you.

5. Spelling: 6-- Why do you use two commas? This is the first time I'm seeing something like this. Two commas every time you want to use one. You have a few mistakes though, nothing editing can't fix. Some of the spelling errors come from changing your tense. Instead of using has, you use have. Wants instead of want. Things like that. Stick with either present or past. Your book is past tense, so that would do. Use "quotation marks please" to encase your dialogue, not apostrophes.

6. Vocabulary development: 9-- I like how you're using simple sentences and straightforward words to execute your story. Big grammar in my opinion distracts me. What makes it better is that, your style of writing fits the theme of the story. Simple and straightforward just like secondary school.
P.S Your dialogue shouldn't be in italics. Italics are for thoughts. I used to think your characters were thinking.

7. Character development: 6-- To be honest. The only people registered in my brain are Jade, Hana, Uthman, Dan and Michelle. I'm pretty sure there are more characters. I talked about slowly introducing them, this is effective best when the focus is on them at a particular time in the story. At least, that's how I can remember those ones. Well, your characters are different from each other, a good thing. The way you execute your dialogue is on point as well, like a window to how they think and behave.

8. Nigerian based: 11--Well I think it's very Nigerian for a secondary school. They pride themselves in competitions, head boys and girls are always seen as representative in competitions. It feels like a normal Nigerian school. The whole crush thing isn't going overboard as well, they're still under the restrictions of the teachers. There's assembly. You also use Yoruba sometimes.
I just noticed (and I usually do) you barely see any secondary school named "high school" I don't know why most Nigerian books use this. And we don't say/use cafeterias, it's dining hall or refectory. And it's usually very large. So, you cant grab everyone's attention at once because of something that's happening in a corner.