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Gurlcynical - Lost in Havoc

Title: Lost in Havoc

Chapters read: 11

Score: 7/10

What I LIKED about your book:

The book explores a lot of subjects, exposing us to a tale of moving-on and surviving at first, all while opening up into an innocent journey to find one's self. We are first introduced to an, admittedly, cliche set-up as we are shown the everyday routine of our main character, Ellie. As the story progresses though, the story transitions from an outlook and introduction to Ellie's life into her recovery and the little steps she take to alienate herself from the trauma and fear that she received from her father's death.The story explores a wholesome representation of grief and one's efforts to move on from it and to avoid dwelling into it's shadowy grasp. It journeys deep into our character's deepest thoughts and perceptions to present to us a beautiful coming-of-age story through an undoubtedly emotional rollercoaster.

Moving on to the characters, Ellie is especially developed to appeal to the plot. Her characteristics and her plight is accentuated by her tight-knit connection to the plot's development. Initially, Ellie's character was very unstable and frankly, I had a hard time understanding her first regarding her antics and her mannerisms. As the story progressed though, you've clearly painted her in an easier and more lighthearted fashion that fully exposes both sides of her personality. Beautiful development of the supporting characters also. The characters not only served the plot and helped it develop, but also helped Ellie's character grow and develop.

Regarding the plot's structure, I have no negative comments towards it. The flow of the story was smooth and very coherent. The direction of the plot was easily established along with the conflict early on in the story and it gave us an insight and what to expect as the plot progresses. Honestly, the plot has presented a lot of interesting factors such as character development and a lot of unexpected plot devices that pushed out a lot of elements that would've made the story boring.

Towards your description though, my stance is mixed. I'll be narrating the positive side of your writing style and description here. Your writing style is very detailed and highly-descriptive and it never fails to give us a scene that is easy to visualize. Your writing style actually emphasizes some scenes as you have an affinity into tapping into our emotions. Beautiful description of scenery further adds aesthetic into the story and of course, towards the setting of the story.

What I DIDN'T LIKE about your book:

I don't have a lot of comments regarding the negatives but some issues are ones that I heavily disliked and truthfully, weighed down my review's score a bit.

First thing that I would like to point out is your infodumping of details in a single, concentrated line of text instead of distributing it throughout the story. I noticed that your character descriptions as well as scenery descriptions are all thrown in single paragraphs or so instead of being revealed throughout chapters. For me, this rather takes the creative and fun twist out of descriptions. When you dump all of the information in one long paragraph, it sounds more like being spoon-fed words and texts regarding these mentioned descriptions rather than reading a narrative by a character.

Another is your habit of using irrelevant information. I cannot really tell if the use of such's purpose is by adding fodder into the paragraphs and filling it with more length to look more appealing or it's you concentrating the information once more. Otherwise, my opinion toward this is that there are a lot of information that should've been reserved for other scenes instead of being dumped in a single chapter. This habit gradually softened though as the story progressed but it's more prevalent in the early chapters.

CONCLUSION

I love the book.

When you juxtaposed this with Lady Bird, I can see all the similarities and Lady Bird is one of the movies that, I could say, had a great impact to my life and my overall outlook in it.

Just like Lady Bird, this book goes into the same direction, but this book focuses more on moving on from grief and Lady Bird focuses on finding one's self.

It's staying in my library for sure, and I sure would like to read further into Ellie's growth and development.