Sapphire's Review Store 3.0

Review by Lina: The Lost Wolf

Title: The Lost Wolf

Author: joanna388

Reviewer: linalagosya

Summary: 1.5/5

Okay, I'm going to be direct here. I think you can do much better with your summary. It doesn't tell me enough about the character, the world, or the story. From the blurb, I have no idea what I'm about to read. And all of the separate paragraphs seem completely disconnected to each other.

My suggestion would be to start with your protagonist, Val, and tell us what kind of person she is. Something more specific than she's not a normal teenage girl. Because that could be true of any teen fiction protagonist. I think you can tell us that she discovers she's a wolf because this is clearly a shapeshifter story so it's not a big surprise. And her life is overturned. Suddenly she's part of a new pack, and she doesn't know who to trust when mysterious secrets about her past start coming to the surface, and no one seems willing to talk. Maybe mention something about who will be the antagonist of the story. Perhaps the Alpha, I'm not entirely sure.

Based on the first thirteen chapters, that's what I think the book is about. It seems to have very little to do with her past life and not having any friends or moving around a lot. I think saying that the friends are going to betray her and lie to her is too much of a giveaway. You want to set up the main story and plot line. 

Grammar: 4/5

Overall, the grammar wasn't too bad. There were some typos and some issues with dialogue formatting, but otherwise nothing too terrible. You were consistent with your tenses. There were some run-on sentences and things like that, but I figured that it was more a style thing than a grammar issue. The two things that caused some issues was the dialogue formatting and the use of pronouns.

For the dialogue, you sometimes use periods instead of commas. So something like:

"I'm never getting used to that." Daphne drawled.

This should be: 

"I'm never getting used to that," Daphne drawled.

This is true of anytime you have a dialogue tag. You don't always need a dialogue tag. Sometimes you can have the dialogue and then it's followed by an action that the character does. Then you don't need to use a comma. So for example:

"We're here." Daphne pulled into the driveway.

That is correct.

The pronouns were the bigger issue though. It's often unclear who is speaking the lines of dialogue. There are lots of she's and he's it could be referring to. It sometimes made the story very hard to follow along with. For example, in this crucial moment in chapter four:

"Can you hold for a sec?" Samantha passed her book and kept rummaging in her locket. The instant she made contact with the book, everything around her faded to a blur and voices broke out...."

It's unclear if it's Samantha or Val having their vision blur and hearing voices. A few sentences later you have:

"Val? Val!" She flinched and covered her ears....

Because the action is tied to the dialogue, this seems like it's Samantha flinching and covering her ears, because she's the one speaking. Breaking up your paragraphs more and using names instead of pronouns more often will help to clear a lot of that up. You need to make sure to separate the dialogue and the action if the person speaking the dialogue and doing the action is not the same. Also, don't rely on "the wolf" being a good enough way to separate characters, as there are many wolves. The chapter where the rogues show up got very confusing very quickly.