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Review by Jacob: The Butterfly Effect

Title: The Butterfly Effect

Author: beyoujm

Reviewer: Prince_Pretence

Blurb: 2/5

My reaction to the opening line of the blurb was 'okay, that's epic, and this is going to be great' until it came to the part of 'she said as her brown orbs stared into the distance'. It not only broke the whole rhythm of the first good line, but it also confused me immensely on further reading the book where the narrator turns out to be 'he' and not she. So, what was the point of introducing this 'she' here?

Moving to the entire blurb; it is more like a summary being narrated by one person to the readers. Until you had planned to keep this narration consistent throughout the book, i.e., tell the entire book in this format, this attempt at blurb writing made it feel disconnected, and it does not reveal much for the readers to interested in the book. 'The two brothers were always treated as equals by family and friends'—was there a reason for them to be treated differently? 'As the world splits them apart'—why did the world split them apart. The problem here is that among the four essential points of information that must be present in a good blurb, we only get to see a glimpse of one—the characters, who are two brothers. But then again, there is the 'she' as the narrator first, and then the blurb is told from an omniscient point of view. There is the solid aim, stake and setting or even one of the other three for the readers to care to know why and what happened to these two brothers, who may or may not be at all different than any of us.

That could've been ignored for once, if not for "your" suggestion with the line 'find out by reading—' which takes the essence of this whole blurb, rendering it to be a mystery that the readers must solve by reading. The Taster Quotes part, at its best, is distracting. The conclusion is, while there are questions present in the blurb, they're forced upon your possible readers because readers themselves obtained no information whatsoever through the blurb to ask any question.

Cover: 3/5

Not terrible, per se, but I had to look and relook at it. By the looks of it, the cover seems for a romance cover, while the blurb speaks of two brothers' story and then you've yourself emphasised that the book is mystery/thriller, which puts me in a state of confusion.

Grammar: 2/5

If grammar is simply about spelling mistakes, The Butterfly Effect has almost none. But throughout the book, tenses swap with every paragraph. Literally. The story opens with a past continuous tense, moves on current tense and keep deflecting all the time. While one of the characters speak [which is rarely], suddenly everything is happening in the present tense, and then it goes back to past participle or continuous. The author of the book must choose a tense and stick around with it. From the looks of Ram and Shyam, the two brothers are in the actual presence of the story, two grownup men, because there is often foreshadowing while their childhood stories are told. Since the book opens with their childhood and is possibly moving towards adulthood, it's not compulsory that childhood must be present in past tenses. Especially when up until the seventh chapter, it seems like whatever is happening with the two brothers is already tearing them apart. Part of the problem here is narration and point of view, which is not allowing the tenses to stay consistent. [More on narration and point of view in the Writing Style section.] There are too many 'the's throughout the story—lack of dialogue tags in every single dialogue through the book.

Character Building: 3/5

Merely speaking, Ram and Shyam have developed until the seventh chapter well enough then they had started, but it's not very impacting. We still don't know how is this going to prove useful with the story further, and it's even confusing because we don't know what the story that we are dealing with here is. Is it merely about how Ram and Shyam will turn out in the future? If so, then there is not enough provided about the two brothers for the readers to care about. Sure, we read their stories right from when one is 9, and the other is 7 years old. But what after that? This is a problem of mostly lack of an actual story here, so more on this in Plot section.