Jabberwocky Reviews

21: Rhodoreef by SuVida777

@SuVida777, Rhodoreef

"An ambitious teen mermaid has to escape her guarded underwater city and brave the polluted, climate-ravaged wilds of the Indian Ocean, in order to find her human soulmate and forge a better future for her people.

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The city of Calliathron is the epitome of modern sea life--a hubbub of color and activity contained within a glorious coral atoll in the Indian Ocean. Yet, the ripples of the changing world beyond seep in with increasing force, bleaching color and darkening minds--but not Dea Rhodoreef's mind.

That day, all Dea could think about was walking her sea cow to the seagrass meadows. Who said life's easy for a high school teen? Even more so when one is a pastel goth mermaid trying to scrape by in a modest mobile home with her grumpy grandmother, who's always complaining about the "human infestation". Maybe the troubled city-state will embrace a new dawn when merpeople and humans co-exist--a future that Dea is determined to work hard for. Noble causes aside, just getting to see a notorious human is number one on her bucket list.

Now, as if school, a part-time job and a looming political career aren't enough, a chubby sea cow has been following her for days. It's time to return him to the wild--not like she'd run into a human. Right?

© 2022 Su Vida

Exclusively on Wattpad

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FEATURED @talesofthedeep @WattpadAsianFantasy @SpeculativeFiction + 4 more

This oceanpunk tale comes with realistic tech and mammalian mermaids (not fish). Strap in for a roller-coaster ride of adventure, fun twists, feels, kawaii-ness and slowburn romance!"

I'm writing this review after finishing your book, or I guess part one of it, and when looking back at the blurb I think the primary issue is that you talk too much about things that don't actually show up in the text, or when they do, they come up too late to be relevant. The fact that the setting is "climate-ravaged " comes up occasionally, but isn't a real plot point in what's been published yet, and the same applies for the rhetoric about the city being "troubled" (we aren't given evidence for this yet) or what this means in concrete terms for why she's meeting with Dilip. The blurb's also very long, and that comes from including a lot of information that isn't going to be that relevant to a reader on July 8th, 2022 reading this book. I'd trim details like her part-time job and looming political career (are these actually mentioned?) and rephrase it in terms of the main conflict we're presented with, her finding some way to get to modern Sri Lanka (I hope you're proud of me that I recognized the language on the ID as Sinhalese before it was mentioned in the story). It's a perfectly interesting journey without all the fluff. And when your story's fully uploaded, you can put that stuff back in.

I'm not going to comment much on plot because I'd be reviewing a small portion of it. It works, largely, although at times the pacing feels disproportionate to what's actually been published: we meet Dilip pretty quickly, but it feels like for most of the book we're doing other things—this is going to be fixed when you upload the rest of the book, certainly, but I felt like there was a lot of build-up without any true climax to conclude the first part. Overall, though, I think you understand what's expected of an homage and execute it well.

As much as I love your book's premise and broader elements, the devil is in the details, and this is where things start falling apart a little. You have a habit of inserting tangents into your narrative and little details that ring too much of trying to be "clever" than creating immersion for the reader: telling us about a "Fluber Black" raises too many questions than it does answers, and we have lines like "Gazing upon the tranquil wastes, she dwelled on the sheer size of the Earth's oceans—accounting for a whopping ninety-nine percent of all habitable space on the planet" that are needless factual intrusions. I always dislike sentences that begin with present participles like "gazing," but that's something I'll talk about more later—the point is that this is a really unnatural place to include this description, and it's not the only time where details feel random. I think some of this is because while we're in third-person, we spend so much time with direct narration that anything which isn't that feels out of place.

There are other tangents too—I recall passages about whale watching and humans' body hair that break up the flow—but I want to shift focus. There are a lot of descriptive phrases that produce this same excess of information I mentioned earlier: in the first chapter, we have the line "Indeed, the chubby mass before her was almost her size, but nothing like a humongous adult animal that rivaled the bulk of a four-seater DSV." Assuming you're referring to the transport company, how does Dea know what this is? All this long line of description does is tell us, as we learned in the previous sentence, that the cow is small—and it's easy to parse this sentence too quickly and think it's saying the cow is simultaneously Dea's size and rivaling the bulk of a truck. Near the end of the book, hope is described as "surging like a lava burst," a description I think best describes acid reflux—let's take a look at that entire paragraph, actually:

"She inhaled noisily and tasted a nebulous concoction of molecules in the air. Her brain discerned faint notes that registered as rust. Recovering a semblance of calm, her eyes sought the ogi, its soft glow reminiscent of moonlight.

The unmistakable form of an exit showed up on the feed. Hope surged up like a lava burst."

There are a lot of phrases here that feel contextually inappropriate or otherwise strange: it's hard to point out exactly what reads weirdly about "nebulous concoction of molecules" other than that it's the same excess I've pointed out in a lot of other reviews as being cloying. You have that same verb structure again here ("recovering..."), and a soft, moonlight-like glow is best used to describe something more pleasing than a marine cell phone. There's this idea that more is always better when it comes to description, but what people mean by that is that it's best to use a lot of words to make one idea perfectly clear than drown us in a torrent of adjectives. "The unmistakable form of" adds nothing, for instance, and you mix so many metaphors and senses of description with this it feels like a slurry. It was at about the second time you described someone gawping like a grouper fish that I realized what might have been charming in moderation at the beginning of the book was not as funny after reading eighteen, nineteen chapters.

I'll add a brief note here about paragraph lengths because it feels like I'm the only one who thinks paragraphs should convey some division of idea. These short paragraphs are enabling you to jump to and fro between ideas, and I promise readers can tolerate multiple sentences. You don't need byzantine, ten-sentence paragraphs describing swimming pools and Silicon Valley neighborhoods if you don't want to, but they need to feel logical. I challenge you, actually: find a book with long paragraphs, either on Wattpad or elsewhere, and try to figure out the internal logic, the intuition, of where the breaks occur.

In general, I think you got a bit too ahead of yourself in executing your fresh idea—it is a good one—without making sure your writing carried it forward. There are too many embellishments, too many conceits, for this to feel right. It's hard to describe—you know it when you see it. And like I said at the beginning, these get in the way of your themes and the rest of your story. They're like will-o'-wisps pulling me off the forest path into the swamp. As you finish the rest of this story, I want you to think about this clarity of idea and unity of purpose, and understand that whatever ideas you have need to be built on a solid foundation. The devil is in the details. Judging by the comments people have been leaving on each other's reviews as a whole, I don't think you're alone in this: it's very easy to get caught up in superficial details, cute turns of phrase, without seeing the forest for the trees—or if they're nothing but smoke and mirrors.

I'm going to give you a 77/100: I think your issues are fixable, and the fact you actually have a good, inventive idea for your story is pushing you into a slightly higher bracket. My recommendation to you, as it is for most people, is to read more. I specifically encourage you to seek out writing that's the opposite of yours so you can see from the outside a little. You might be able to steal a trick or two, or come to a better understanding of why the only "lava burst" I might have felt surging was a different sort (I kid—my apologies).