Jabberwocky Reviews

4: Twisted Affair by aisekaii

"❝ Our contentment derives from within which is where our happiness begins. ❞

Desperate to escape a toxic relationship, Maverick and Leah decided to spend their summer together in search of a fresh start.

They've gone through ups and downs as they tried to fix their past relationships. Both of them have the same reasons why they dumped their partners in the end.

Thinking that Leah is the righteous one for him, he tried to get her by hook or by crook. Unfortunately, Maverick became suspicious which made Leah have a second thought to be with him.

Would she give him another chance after finding out that he knew everything all along or play safe?

© 2022 aisekaii

Genre: Teen Fiction

Language: Pure English"

This review's coming out so soon after the last one because this was a very short book (at least with what's been posted so far). It's definitely going to take me longer to write this review than it did to read what's been posted. That's not a bad thing, but it also means that this review's going to be very short.

The blurb conveys the plot well, but as will apply for the rest of the book, check for typos and odd word choice. "Righteous" means something different than "right" in this context and isn't really fitting for a romantic story like this, and "by hook or by crook" is a phrase that strikes me as a bit old-fashioned compared to the prose. I'm not Grammarly, nor am I going to point out every typo (you wrote "glaze" instead of "gaze" in the first chapter, for instance), but that's one thing which stood out to me immediately.

Moving on, I was struggling to figure out the benefit of switching between first and third person perspectives, especially so frequently; most books which do that shift into first-person later on in the novel for sections (an example would be Beloved by Toni Morrison), and don't switch immediately from the start. One consequence of this is that it took me a moment to figure out which character we were following in the prologue (I believe it's Leah). Even if you do choose to keep the switching perspectives, you also don't need to signpost them at the top of your chapters, technically speaking. At least the third person—labeling which character's POV we're looking at is fine. It's obvious when we're in third-person.

While we're on the topic of formatting, which isn't strictly a grammar thing, the square brackets for dialogue aren't standard, and I'm not quite sure what they're supposed to indicate. An example.

"Seah never trusts disappointments. 'You better watch out. There's a difference between opportunity and chances.'

['Let's go outside? I want some fresh air.']

Leah sounds exhausted. She badly needs some fresh air because she's being problematic about her old guy. Well, that was suffocating..."

Is this an unnamed character speaking? Is this internal monologue—and if so, whose? From whose perspective is "well, that was suffocating..." coming from? This sort of thing makes the third-person hard to follow. I also think it's revealing of another issue: your sentence structure is often repetitive in a way that isn't necessarily difficult to read, but makes it more boring to do so. You have a lot of short sentences that start with "I" or another pronoun, that make the rhythm telegraphic in a way I didn't appreciate much. An excerpt from the prologue:

"A cheery smile appears on my face together with an uneasy feeling on the inside. I messaged my boyfriend to inform him that I'm on my way to the park. I need to hurry because I don't want to keep him waiting. I'm already ten minutes late.