J's Reviews [closed to catch up]

#11: Freeridge's Advocates

First Impressions
The Cover, well it's not great if I'm honest. The image used is neither bright nor eye-catching and the rather looking woman pictured with the silly hat pulled over her eyes is off-putting in my opinion. I'm sorry but the bright red type and the font used really doesn't do it for me.
The summary again isn't brilliant. Until today I had never even heard of this tv show and actually had to google it to make sure it was a tv show and not a book or a video game or something. To me, these characters are random, but let's see how we get on.

If you've read some of my other reviews (and I really hope you have) then you'll know that I'm not a fan of character introduction pages. I know they're popular here but I just see them as a complete waste of time. I much prefer writers to describe their characters using words instead of sticking photos of them in a separate chapter. I understand these are characters from a tv show but have you actually screenshot the actors Instagram account and posted it in the book?

Chapter 1: Arrival
Ok well, it's not a bad chapter title, but it could be a lot stronger. We know by the chapter title that it is about arrival, but to me that gives the chapter away. I've been writing books over half my life, and through the years I've come to realise that the best thing to do with chapter titles is to go with something cryptic but not too cryptic. You want something mysterious but not so it confuses the readers. At the moment I feel the one you're currently using is a little bit obvious.

Like I said earlier, I had never heard of this tv show before. I've asked around in Shut Up and Write and no one there seems to have heard of it either. I did, however, look it up on google last night and have a read of the Wikipedia article. What I found out is that it's a Netflix show about high school students. I don't quite know which characters are yours or which are from the tv show but I'll do this review the best I can.

Ok, well for the first sentence of a book I will have to say that it is a little on the weak side. It is lacking an immediate hook which is vital to keep the reader reading. I'm unsure what the word Mija means. I've heard it before and I think it may mean child, but I don't know. I understand this is a cultural thing, I'm from the U.K. and Mija isn't a word I'm familiar with. It's very easy when writing to forget that not all your readers will be from the same part of the world like you, and may not know what certain words mean, so it's just a little thing for you to bear in mind when writing.

As I read through this chapter I can see that there are quite a few issues here with the tense. You do seem to be using both past and present tense. It's much better for the readers and for you as a writer yourself, to be consistent with tense, so pick one and stick to it instead of muddling the two up. I will admit I know a lot of writers who are much more experienced than you that still mess up the tenses now and again. It's something to keep an eye out for when you're writing or when you're editing your work.

I'm going to be honest with you, although the grammar isn't great, this isn't the worst I've ever read. I mean it's not the best I've ever read either, it's a bit all over the place, but certainly not the worst.

Ok, now I'm a little confused as to whether or not the little girl is your main character's daughter or not. The girl seems to be calling her by the name of Tia, which makes me think they probably aren't mother and daughter.

Again, be careful with these words. Not everyone will know what Abuela means, though I have heard it before and know it's the grandmother.

Ohh, dear. It is much better to have your character see, hear, smell, feel or taste something that triggered the flashback rather than just put *flashback* as you have with this scene.

I'm getting a little confused as this doesn't really read like fan fiction, as I can't see any of the tv shows characters in this chapter and I'm at least halfway through the chapter.

Be careful of the spacing here as I can see a very very long paragraph that seems to go on and on for quite a few pages. It would help when reading this on a small screen like my phone if you were to space it out a little bit.

I'm also not a fan at all about people putting videos of images in the middle of the chapter. I don't really know where the right place to put them is, I suppose above the title in the image/video box. But I feel that putting them in the middle like this is a bit of a distraction away from the story.

Actually, as I read through this I am getting more and more confused by a lot of it, especially the flashback scene. I know where it starts, as that's all been pointed out to me, but I don't know where on Earth this finishes. One minute she seems to be an adult with a child, and then suddenly she's a ten-year-old. There's some blood and she's bruised from being in a street fight but it's a little bit of a muddle and I haven't even started the second chapter.

When you have characters that are shouting, you don't really need to put the whole dialogue in capital letters as it's a little bit unsightly. It's better just to write it as you would any other text and then just use a simple exclamation mark. It looks better and it looks cleaner than the capital letters.

Chapter one is desperately lacking a hook to keep the readers interested and will admit I did skip a few bits.

Conclusion
I always try and read at least three chapters and sometimes I will read more, but this depends on how easy the book is to read and the length of the chapters. Unfortunately, this chapter was too much of a difficult read for me to continue past the first chapter.

Due to the length of this chapter I have found myself skipping over some of it as it really is a muddle. I feel there's far too much going on for the reader to take it all in. But it's a salvageable muddle, not a throw it in the bin and start again, muddle.

My advice to you would be to join a writing community like the one I told you about in pm. There are loads of people in the group who will take time to help you really improve this book and your writing as a whole. I feel this is probably your first book, so you're a beginner. The group I spoke to you about has members of all ages and abilities and I think you will fit in brilliantly. It also runs a read for a read book club which would give you more feedback on your story.

Another thing that you could do that would help you would be to download Grammarly. It is free to use the software you download on to your computer that will help you with your spelling and grammar. It's so easy to use that I'm even using it now to polish you this review before I post it. There's also a phone app which is like a second keyboard. It does exactly the same thing is the computer software does and it's free, which makes it so great.