Sapphire's Review Store 3.0

Review by Addie: What Lies Within

Title: What Lies Within

Author: ayyreaa

Reviewer: Addison-AJ

Summary: 3.9/5

 Your summary is pretty captivating. I love how you start it off with an excerpt from the book. This was a great hook for the reader and transitioned into the rest of your description. You tie it all together with a descriptive paragraph about what lies within their characteristic. I also liked how you related that paragraph to the title. Well done with that!

The only thing is that there could have been more questions. Talk about the stakes and what the conflict is. You did a marvelous job of describing the characters, but there's so much more you could add. What happens if they do fall in love? Will it connect to anyone else?

And even building off the characters, you can include more about how they're practically opposites. In addition, you mentioned in a sentence that nobody knows who Hayden is. I suggest making it flow more smoothly in that particular paragraph. This is because you wrote about three sentences related to his personality and character. Then, you talk about how his identity is different? I would recommend revising that part a little.

Another paragraph that had the same issue was the one before it. This was the one that described Rhea's life and personality. This structure of this part was perfectly executed, other than one minor mistake. In the first sentence, you switched from her being a regular college girl to a not-so-regular one. In my opinion, this altered the pace of that. If you'd like to use it, I would suggest that you do it in two separate sentences.

To explain this, I will come up with two examples for you. Try not to switch from one idea to another in a matter of words. That makes it feel more rushed or forced than usual. Perhaps you could even it out by splitting up the two different ideas? Here is an example that I decided to make to explain this better:

Before Editing: Rhea Bayer is your regular 20 years old college girl but if you look closely she is not even in the neighborhood of regular.

After Editing (example): Rhea Bayer is your regular 20 year old college girl. She's the type of person who looks innocent and friendly on the outside. But if you take a closer look, you'll notice she's not even in the neighborhood.

This is something you can do with Hayden's as well. Even out the information with Rhea's, and add more to Hayden's. Moving on, there was one grammatical error that I found in your summary. When you talk about Rhea and Hayden, I believe the word 'years' wasn't supposed to be plural. It should have been 'Rhea Bayer is your regular 20 year old college girl.' But otherwise, your summary was wonderful!

Character Building: 3.8/5

 Your characters are very easy to follow since the book is written from different perspectives. I love how Hayden and Rhea have the same voice and thoughts, but just different perspectives most of the time. I was thinking about how it was going to be easy to understand with the different points of view, but you pulled it off. That's probably because of the interactions between the characters.

I have a few pointers that might help. I'll start off with the one that I think is the most important. This is introducing too many characters at once. At first, there were about seven characters you told the reader about. This was before the book even started because you had a chapter for the main characters. While this was helpful after I came back to it after I finished the book, it was very confusing at the beginning.