Quest Reviews (CLOSED FOR CATCH UP)

Kola's review

By A Rose ChiddyE01

Review by @renegxde

Title

I love what the name suggests as opposing to the genre of the book. It’s intriguing and definitely interesting. I do believe that you could remove the whole capitalisation of the name. Keeping it, “By A Rose.”

Cover

I definitely like the idea of mystery that is given through the cover. You have been able to show that this is not a love story, this is so much more. Through the font style and colour, all these details come to light and it’s a smart move. Great job!

However, I do believe that the cover can be a lot more attractive. The blending style and face image could be much better executed along with the name placement. I would highly suggest that you choose a graphic designer and explain the idea that you see in her head to create a wholesome book cover. I suggest Monography by themonocommittee.

I also suggest removing the face claim and focusing on the blood and rose. These two elements play hand-in-hand with title and it will show the plot perfectly.

Blurb

“Old friends and acquaintances of—“

By using these words, you have made the major plot detail too vague. I don’t understand who these people are. Since this is the first statement about the world that you have created, you need to be bold and specific about these characters. The storyline definitely begins with these murders, so who are they? Why do these ‘old friends and acquaintances’ of Ramona matter?

How do you show the importance of these characters and their deaths? 

Suggestion: “When Ramona’s three friends are murdered, she recognises that all her deaths happen the same way.”

(This is just a suggestion, I recommend using your own voice to create a sentence that showcases the importance of the three friends’ deaths and how they were killed).

“The worst happens when the murders of old reoccur in the same style as before, after five years!”

The intention of this sentence gets muddled up in the wordy form. You need to increase the efficiency the words you have chosen so that your sentences become clear even if they are short. Personally, I think that is what shows you are a bold and confident writer. I’m going to split these sentences up bit by bit to help you understand how to improve them with word building and sentence structuring.

“The worst happens when the murders of old—“

This refers to the past and hints that her life is about to get a lot more complicated.
Suggestion: “The mystery of the murders thicken—“

It’s always good to be specific with what you are talking about in the blurb. You have a limited amount of words to grip the audience to and you need to make every second of it count. 

“—reoccur in the same style as before, after five years.”

This portion of the sentence talks about the time component twice. Usually repetition intensifies the importance of some events, however, I think the sentence structure here, does not allow that. 

Suggestion: “—once again.”

I believe that you can inflect the same meaning through different vocabulary and placement of sentence structure. Sometimes when writing, there’s a lot of thoughts that happen at once which leads to sentences with a lot of wordy elements. For me, re-reading the sentences with a fresh mind helps to see if the sentence has the same impact as intended. You need to build that intuition over time and for me, that happened the more I read books, and understood the depth of grammar.