Since both our first and second review stores have exceeded 200 chapters (with a grand total of 379 reviews published), I am opening up this third book to fit in all of our future reviews. Yay team!
We are still OPEN to requests, however, this book...
I really liked the part about the summary that talked about the two different struggles the men had. That introduced your characters a bit and showed the potential conflict of the story. Although the thing about the girls at the beginning is cute, I found it really hard to understand. It almost makes it seem like there are actually four characters, and that muddled the story for me. It made more sense once I started reading, of course, but I think you could make it much clearer in your blurb.
Grammar: 4/5
For the most part I found there weren't too many errors and it was fairly easy to read. The biggest issue was that you use commas instead of periods quite a bit, creating a lot of run-on sentences and in some places, some confusion. I would suggest using more periods and breaking up your sentences to make for a smoother read.
Character Building: [no score]
I didn't score this, since it's kind of hard since I'm only reading a few specific chapters. But I did think that the characters' relationship was unfolding in an interesting way. They did seem very similar, but I think a part of that is because aside from the love scenes, I never really got to see any of their conversations. I did get a little bit more information when they were messaging each other online. That helped differentiate them, as Yunlan seemed a bit more reckless and driven by his emotions and his attraction, whereas Shen Wei seemed more thoughtful and reserved.
Writing Style: 3/5
You mentioned that your writing style is different. I did find it simple and refreshing. The love scenes were pretty dynamic and I found myself invested in their relationship because of the way you were writing it. That said, generally I find it really hard to fully engage when there's so little description. There were a lot of times where I just had no clue where the characters even were, what it looked like. This story seems more to focus on kind of moving to the different love scenes, with the online conversations mixed in. If that's how you want the story to be, then by all means, ignore me! I just think a bit more description and actually getting into some different scenes might be nice to flesh out the story.
Plot + Originality: 3/5
It's a fairly standard love story, with the twist that these two men are talking online to each other and only one of them knows it. I thought that twist was cute and added a little extra flair to this story.
OVERALL SCORE: 13/20
I kept this review short since you mostly wanted to discuss your specific questions. Hopefully my additional thoughts were helpful to you as well! Overall I was enjoying the romance between your characters. It was sweet and erotic, nicely done.
I think it should definitely be marked as mature. Even though you don't use explicit terms necessarily (you have clever ways of working around them, haha!), the scenes are fairly explicit and it's clear that they are sex scenes. So to be safe, I would recommend marking it as mature. You can make a note of it in the blurb if you want, that it's marked mature from sexual content. That way you've done your due diligence in warning everyone.
I think you don't need a full stop after the emojis in the story. I think it works well how you have it, putting whatever was actually typed into quotations. So if one of the characters didn't type a period or a comma, then I wouldn't worry about it. What I would suggest, to avoid confusion, is to match a little bit of what a message system would look like? So maybe, separating each text into its own line, and playing with the right and left alignment, or something like that. So for example:
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Something like that, but you can play around with it however you like. I don't always suggest doing the texts like this, but since this is such an important part of the story, it seems fitting. Just something to think about! As it is, I think it made sense, for the most part. Hope that's helpful!
