Ancient's Smashing Reviews

His Uncertain Love

TLDR; Soap Drama romance on SPEED!

Grammar: Not a native English speaker - This is the first and most obvious thing to address. The author is learning English. So I will not formally count the grammar against her, but it still needs to be recognized it has a fundamental problem. Not only does the way things get phrased make it difficult to read, but worst of all I don't think her keyboard has a period key. No dots. I am scowering the story just to look for periods, and I cannot find a single one. Nor can I find a single exclamation point despite the phrasing sounding like it would be followed up by one. Most sentences have no punctuation and the rest have very little, with at most a comma or question mark. And for some reason quotations are surrounded in an unusual number of keyboard spaces, this is more unusual despite how hard it also makes it to read because it makes me think the author tends to space things out to make notes like a university paper draft. Usually I dont care about punctuation, but my limit is when it makes it nearly impossible to read. So I really hope the author can buy a keyboard with the keys on it. The way things are phrased I'll give a pass as the author is not comfortable with English.

World Building: Told, told, and told some more - The world is a small group of characters that have internal relations with each other. It suffers horribly from the choice to have every single little thing told instead of shown.

Plot: SPEED! - The plot, so far as I can tell, has juicy drama. You have a guy who lacks the balls to man up to his dead father about who he does and doesn't want to marry, but has the balls to tell his wife that he is going to drop her at the first opportunity for a mistress. (This seem like inconsistent characterization of what he is and isn't willing to do, who in his family he is willing to hurt, for a goal that he can't decide what to do about, because it isn't explored nor developed nor shown nor is his motivations revealed before, during, or after. It is just told.) Then you have a girl who is a people pleasure to abusive people and seems like she is trying to keep the peace and is all about suffering for the sake of others quietly.

On a surface level I quite like the initial premise. On the surface it seems inconsistent with him, but it has room to be explored to show how it is more based on the relationships and motivations he has with different people, as to who he is and isn't willing to step up to, hurt, or man up against. And taking pain in silence is a feminine strength not allowed to be explored too often in today's culture.

However the story runs on speed and the plot goes out the window in only a few chapters as the characters change on a dime.

 The relationship between the parents is not good, as we are told. The relationship with the daughter and parents is not good, as we are told. The relationship between the daughter and her sister are decent, as we are told. The relationship between the sister and her husband was eloping, as we are told. The relationship between the eloped husband and the original parents is not good, as we are told. The relationship between the original parents and the sister that eloped with her husband is not good, as we are told. The primary woman thinks the primary man is hot, as we are told. He went along with it to honor his father, as we are told. He wants out to go with his girlfriend, as we are told. Hopefully now you are seeing a pattern. We are told things. A lot. The story does not take the time to explore any of the events that have helped shape their lives, nor does it take the time to explore the relationships as they are in the current period, nor do the characters act in such a way as if to work off of that past history and flesh it out into the current period.

The story does begin to flesh out things a tiny bit starting in chapter 4-5, with there being current events that shift the dynamics and relationships a bit based on the information given in the past, but, its too late. The story spent 90% of its word space telling us, as if I was being forced to read a wiki page, on the relationship dynamics in two families. This. Is. Boring. As. Shit. I don't give a shit how interesting the information is, when you spend 90% of your word space giving it like a wiki page then the start has failed. Readers are not asking for a summary of the last 30 years of their lives among 6+ people. They want a story. When you don't give a story, then people don't see a reason to read, much less care about the information being given or the characters it involves.

After chapter 4-5 it is just speed ontop of being told. Their emotions are told in abundance instead of being shown in any way or capacity. Then what might account for conflict or emotional tension or the story just being allowed to breath in between story beats just doesnt exist. It is like the emotional version of Transformers 3, where things move so incredibly fast with chapters that are so short I still, even after taking the time to read and reread and study the wiki pages, still can only walk away with "what the hell is happening???" There needs to be time, there needs to be words put in between the story beats to allow people to breath it in and process what is happening.

But it isn't. The chapters are so short, the story beats happen so suddenly and so quickly with no given motivations provided nor developed, because so many things are just simply told... that in the end you have something I cannot call a story, but an outlined summary of what the story wants to show but isn't taking the time to.

Characters - Sacrificed at the altar - The story makes a fundamental mistake of making the story told, of being about told actions, rather than shown emotions and processing things internally. This mistake is fundamental because this is meant to be a romance, and romances are about shown emotion. Because of this, what might otherwise be characters, are just empty vehicles mean to bring us from action to action. I cannot call them characters as they were sacrificed. Plot comes first, not character. This can work for some action-based hero journey stories that are highly violent or grandiose in design, but this cannot work for romances that depend on depth and complexity of character and the emotional motivations they do every detail with.

Overall I would rate it 1.5/5. The story has a decent idea of what it wants to be at a high level, but is not making any effort in bringing it to life before our eyes. And I am not counting the grammar when I say that.