Jabberwocky Reviews

13: Melody by botronny

"Melody Raven hasn't had an easy life. Though surrounded by people who love, care, and are willing to help her at the drop of a hat, Melody is blinded by past trauma, and challenged by the surge of anxiety which she battles daily.

The only way she has been able to alleviate her pain is by crafting a list of plans and expectations to be completed by Christmas Eve. Despite the underlying feeling of uneasiness about the upcoming year, she faces it head-on, determined to change her life for the better.

However, is she ready for a startling truth thatʼs lying in the shadows, prepared to throw her life off-balance?"

I think your blurb is fairly clear. It introduces a character, some idea of theme, and the direction the plot is going to go in. I'm personally not a huge fan of vagueness over clarity ("startling truth" versus something more concrete), but it's a common strategy for creating intrigue, so I'll let it pass. I'm also going to preface this review by saying that this was another where I didn't feel like there was much I wanted to say.

My first thought when I read the prologue was "does she not have a dustpan?," and as much as I understand this is a lower-level insight than what you're hoping for, I can't deny it was my first thought. People typically don't pick up shards of glass with their hands, and it feels like a contrived reason to emphasize Melody's anxiety with the melodramatic diction more than something plausible. I don't think it would convey her anxiety any less if the surrounding circumstances were different—this is a nitpick, admittedly, but I think it's reflective of trends in the work as a whole.

Typically I save prose-based comments for the end of the review, but I think it bears mentioning that there's this very specific sentence structure you use that becomes very noticeable in repetition: you begin a lot of sentences and paragraphs with present participles—"Holding my diary," "Choosing to ignore it," "Running my left hand," and so on. Like any structural repetition, this sticks out like a sore thumb, and not that passive voice is inherently bad or anything, but I would find a way to rework this. I counted four paragraphs in a row that began in this same way, and perhaps there's a longer streak I missed somewhere.

In general, I don't have any qualms with your plot, and in the interest of brevity I won't spend needless time talking about it. I think you have a handle on this, and related ideas like characterization and theme. With that in mind, my main critique would still be regarding the prose, not because it's awful or anything, but because everything else was relatively inoffensive. You do something rare for Wattpad where you get into your groove more as the book continues; typically on Wattpad, people's first few chapters are great before things go off the rails. One issue I had with the first few chapters is that there's too much lush descriptive language, to the point that it feels hyperbolic and "melodramatic"; you improve on this, later, although there are some passages that still are a bit much. Lines like "my anxiety-filled heart (don't forget the hyphen there) knocked, knocked like a lunatic fist on the padded door of a padded room" have just a bit too much—I get that both the door and the room itself are literally padded, but something doesn't sit right saying it twice. This is the sort of line that's fine in moderation, but that you have to watch when you have too many similar lines in a row.

I'm going to give you an 80/100 because I don't think there's anything you did that badly, but there wasn't much where I was awed. I know I've expressed similar sentiments in a few of my reviews. One thing I'll add is that I saw you've received some quite insightful inline comments—some interestingly critical, for sure, but they point out some of my doubts in a better way than I could in a review. Look to them for guidance. I know I've said before to some people to ignore their comments, but here I think your comments will be helpful for direction. Great work!