Dreamland Review Archive

The Downside of a Wedding (V)

Title: The Downside of a Wedding

Author: @sinfully-sarcastic

First Impressions

Title: The Downside of a Wedding is a fine title. It's functional and informs us of what type of story to expect: there's some romance and there's some wedding stuff going on. It's also not too common of a title so that's cool.

Cover: I think the cover is functional. Nothing really much to say here as it's really the cliche romance cover of a couple close to each other. I do like the font used for the title and how readable it is. But other than that, again, I have nothing much to say here.

Blurb: For the first part of the blurb, I felt like the the second and third sentence were kinda repetitive with the sentence structure of "He ruined *insert word here*". I feel like that could be fixed just by reordering the second sentence like so:

It was supposed to be my biggest wedding.

But my efforts were ruined.

He ruined them by asking for a favor.

If that makes sense?

For the second part of the blurb, I don't think you need to mention the "blooming wedding planner" part because it's redundant. We already know she's a wedding planner just by the fact that got appointed as one. Therefore you can just write the sentence to be: "When Yara Young gets appointed as the wedding planner of one of the..."

Then I wish you could've elaborated more on his antics or personality so we get a clearer look into what type of person is our male lead. For example:

"...she finds it hard to work with the groom's best man, Felix Rodriguez. Haughty, irresponsible, and egotistical, Felix seems to have it in mind to make things difficult for Yara.

After dozens of failed attempts to plan the wedding, Yara decides to make a deal with Felix."

I just pulled the whole "haughty, irresponsible and egotistical" part out of nowhere as an example. It'd be also better if you found a way to sneak in information about Yara's personality in the mix. But yea, doing it this way will allow the audience to get a first impression of what kind of people these characters are. If they like the character types they see from the blurb, they would feel more inclined to read it, especially for a character-driven story like this.

General Thoughts

The first thing of note that I really want to cover is your head-hopping. Head-hopping is what I call switching from one character's PoV to another's out of nowhere. It causes this "wait, what" moment to the reader and breaks immersion. Just from the first chapter, you have lines where you end up describing Caspian's thoughts (which Yara shouldn't know) and therefore head-hop from Yara's PoV to Caspian's PoV. Here are some examples from Chapter 1:

Caspian was unbothered. He knew her better than anyone else and he also knew that annoying Yara was part of his job as a best friend.

It's unclear whether the underlined line is in the PoV of Yara or the PoV of Caspian. Are you telling us that's what Caspian's thinking? Or is it what Yara thinks Caspian is thinking. If it's the latter, then rephrase it a little. For example, it can be reworded as such: She knew that he thought that annoying her was part of his job as a best friend. Or He had this mindset where he thought that annoying her was part of his job as a best friend.

Another example:

...Caspian blurted out, not knowing if what he said made any sense or not. He just wanted to make Yara believe in herself.