The Sleepless Book Reviews [CLOSED FOR CATCHUP)

Hate to love by Vixy29 - reviewed by Ctrain8

Username: Vixy29

Title: Hate to love
Genre: Teen Fiction
Amount of reviewed chapters: 10

Reviewer: Ctrain8

1. Title
This is an interesting title. It is contradictory, so it catches the eye and makes us think for a moment. It doesn't really offer much more than that, but it doesn't need to. I'd say your title is nothing to worry about.

2. Cover
So I don't know a whole lot about covers and reviewing them, but I will say I do like the black and white theme going on here. The letters are bold and stand well in front of the background, although one thing that annoys me is that they're not central on the page. they don't have to be, but if you're going to put them on a cover you'll have to put them to one side or make them in the central format. Not a big deal, but that's just my two cents.

3. Description
Your description is short and not too revealing, which is a plus. It's punchy and effective. My only real problem with it is it's a little too vague. Not vague enough for it to really be a problem, but just vague enough that no character seeps through the description, just merely just classic wattpadian plot points. I hope you know what I mean by that. We have the perfect life 17 y/o girl who didn't expect to fall in love with a "bad boy", and oh yeah there's a plot twist. If you could make your description have more base in character and in substance I feel like it would improve. Then again, description isn't all that important at all so don't sweat it.

4. Plot
For several chapters no real plot emerges other than the new characters themselves. This is tricky business, unless you make it very clever and dynamic. What I mean by this is you will need to make the character driven plot have more substance. This entails that the characters will need, as all characters should have (as all people do), secrets. Mysteries. Desires and limitations. Flaws are important but I won't get into that since this is the plot section.

If your characters drive the plot, make sure they all affect it in their own way. No one will be a mere witness or observer. They all need to affect it, it's like they're all connected by a web. You poke one part of the web, the vibrations will carry out to all the other parts.

5. Writing
So to start this section off I'm going to go on a grammar rant. This includes ellipses, formatting, and a bunch of other mostly irrelevant stuff. It's okay, I'll get to voice and tone and all that at the end of this section.

A quick lesson on ellipses because I'm already here. If you've read any of my past reviews or my own review book you'll know when it comes to ellipses I just have to talk about them. Here's my short rant. In case you don't know, an ellipses is the dot dot dot (...). It represents, as you already know, a trailing off of thought or speech. If you want to put it at the end of a sentence, include an extra period to punctuate, or a question mark. It's not a big deal but I like making big deals out of small things.

Formatting.... This is a tricky part to talk about (did you see what I did there?). While you can format your sentences and paragraphs and blurbs and quotes and dialogue and whatever any way you want, it is best accepted and best read in the literary world when you collect sentences into paragraphs, indent between paragraphs, indent at dialogue, and so on. In here, while it's still allowed, you seem to indent after basically each and every line. There are two things wrong with this: one is that it looks weird and reads weird and two is that you're basically cutting off your writing's hands and telling it to throw a baseball. What I mean by that is whenever you indent at nearly every line you lose the punchiness and impact of what a specifically indented line brings. If I were to indent every line and then indent another and another it would all be uniform and bland. You're writing black letters on a white page (or white on black for my dark mode readers out there) so there's not any extra details and artistry to help you. You have to make do. The way you make do is collecting lines into paragraphs and then occasionally keeping one indented on its own if that line is important. When you do this it makes it so that one line you indented-- instead of every single line-- really important and it calls attention from the reader to that line. Here's a good analogy. Timmy LOVES pizza. If you serve him pizza every night, Timmy will stop seeing pizza as that rare and special thing. However, if you serve him pizza once every couple of months he will see pizza as sooooo much more important and valuable. The same thing goes for specially indented lines. One could argue this goes against a writer's voice, but I'll talk about that more later. The problem that I have with the way you write it is that it reads like a series of texts from a friend telling a story. It took me a while to figure out why it bothered me so much, and then that hit me.