Sapphire's Review Store 3.0

Review by Danielle: The Death Wish

Title: The Death Wish

Author: TheOcclumenist

Reviewer: just_an_astrophile

Summary: 3/5

Your summary is, for the most part, a decent hook for your story. That's what the summary should be - the part that draws the reader's attention and curiosity in just a few words. However, in attempting to intrigue a reader through suspense and mystery, it is easy to lose some necessary information.

I do think you could give us more backstory about Carina - how old is she? How do the aforementioned 'rules' apply to her and her life? What exactly does she want in this story, and how is she going to get it? Why is her family set against her?

We don't even really get a grasp of the plot. When it comes down to it, one knows only two things: Carina is the sister of Draco Malfoy, and she's having struggles with her family. Why does that construct an engaging and fascinating plot? One has no idea yet.

Now, I recognize that plenty of authors like to tell as little information as possible in the summary in order to weave an aura of mystery around the book - but really, that can turn away some readers, myself included. If I don't have basic knowledge of what I'm reading by the time I'm through the summary, there's a good chance I'm going to walk away from the book.

In general, the summary should establish basic information about the character, the main and/or side conflicts in the story, and the stakes of not resolving the conflict. Like I said, what you have written is interesting, but does it include enough of the above information to be relevant?

I didn't mark you down further because I wasn't totally sure if you wanted to leave information out for the sake of intrigue. In that case, your summary is purposefully written, and that tactic is merely not preferable. It's also a fanfiction, which means some basic knowledge is already provided to the reader from the original series. Therefore, I leave my score as is.

Grammar: 3/5

While your grammar as a whole is good, there are a few things that need to be fixed. The first thing I noticed is that you sometimes forget to end your dialogue with a period or comma. For example:

"He's on the quidditch team" Carina stated.

Fixed: "He's on the quidditch team," Carina stated.

Now, if the dialogue were followed by an action, it should be followed by a period instead.

"He's on the quidditch team." Carina looked away.

You get the point. A sentence of dialogue should always have some kind of punctuation before the second quotation mark.

I noticed a lack of action tags throughout your work; you're more likely to follow dialogue with an actual verb. That's fine for much of the time, but keep in mind that people often communicate while performing tasks, and quite a bit of that communication is non-verbal.

You also sometimes overuse dialogue tags in general. It's good to be clear about who is speaking, but excessive clarification becomes verbose and boring. It's not difficult to figure out where dialogue tags should and shouldn't be used: usually, as you go back over your work, your brain will catch any instances where it's hard to tell who is talking.

One last thing I noticed: you use italics rather sporadically. For the majority of the time, they're nonexistent. Then, in certain scenes or chapters, they're all over the place, often stressing words that don't need to be emphasized more than they already are. Most of the time, good dialogue should be strong enough to show which words should be stressed without extra help. It's okay to use italics in certain circumstances, but more often I'd rather rewrite a sentence than use italics to convey a specific meaning.