Reverie Reviews

review #4.S3: Loose Ends Of You And Me

Loose Ends Of You And Me

Author: missmarswrites
Reviewer: LadyInLostYearn

▂▂▂▂▂▂▂
SYNOPSIS

"Home is not a place or a person, home is a feeling."

Wyatt Stone has it bad for Harper Moore since the moment he saw her, at that fateful New Year's party.

And Harper does too. But she owes it to herself to prioritize her dreams over a guy, especially when the guy in question is her best friend's brother.

Harper Moore has been dreaming about New York City her whole life, but now that she's there, it feels like the exact opposite of a dream come true. While she navigates through the growing pains and faces the hardships of this new stage of her life, she will be caught between her strong mind and the heart of gold of Wyatt Stone, who has every intention to tie the loose ends between them.

▂▂▂▂▂▂▂

Disclaimer: While I was reading your book with my best effort to stay unbiased, I might not catch your intended style for your characters, storyline, or purposes. By the end of the day, you control its narrative. I was just passing through, exploring around, and giving a deduction.

Overall review:
I like the title. It's simple and catchy, but not overused or tryhard. The cover doesn't pull me in, however. The blurb is straightforward and doesn't leave any spoilers, which is good, but I feel it needs a bit of a kick.

Amazing hook! The first two paragraphs instantly made me anticipate. Good vocab and no superfluous synonyms too. But I noticed you used commas and 'which' to keep going in several paragraphs. Perhaps they were parts of the writing style, but they gave this breathlessness. Break them up; for example, "I quickly said while spinning around on my swivel chair again, allowing me to face away from them. Made it sound like a perfect excuse to get them off my back. My brain is still thinking about how next week, Harper and I..."

You repeated words like 'while', 'loud', 'back', 'tease' and contexts in one paragraph and small distances between sentences. Lessen this because they drag the flow, creating unnecessary lengths for many paragraphs when they could be concise. An example, "My other friend, Jackson, teased. He said those words in a teasing tone, as if..." could be "My other friend, Jackson, teased as if..." Be aware of grammar like "Jacob sntached the ball away from him" and "why we're taking the same classes -," Using Grammarly (don't fully depend on it) and ProWritingAid can keep this in check. Side note, it's not wrong to begin 'and' for sentences, but try not to make it too frequent. Don't be afraid of connecting the dialogue tags too.

I guess that you wrote this story with direct free-flowing from your mind. No filter. And it's good. You're not hung up on embellishing words. I did that too before. However, you gotta re-read it a few times and maybe feel out which ones could be improved on through a reader's view only.

Great work on the voices. You successfully livened the MCs by their thoughts, and side characters by their body expressions (just elaborate on them occasionally, instead of simple adjectives oftentimes). Risky move because they took up space with points I mentioned before, but somehow I got invested in Wyatt and Harper, and I'm usually difficult to be invested in any character unless I'm ten chapters in. Though... maybe tell their beliefs and character history bit by bit, and don't infodump in one paragraph.

Also, I was hoping to read what happened during New Year's in detail, though maybe you planned to include a flashback in the future. Just an assumption.

I can't say much about the plot since the chapters so far are short, at least to me. But when Harper acted weirdly during the pizza scene where she was desperate enough to isolate and made herself look bad, that really amps up my sense of wonder about her sudden social anxiety.