Gemstone Reviews [Closed for Catch up]

Review #21-Alternatives

Title: Alternatives

Author: Gold_star21

Genre: Science fiction

Rating: PG 13

# of chapters: 4 (ongoing)

# of chapters I read: 3

Summary/ Blurb: 

In 2137, a new society was born and they called themselves the New Union. Their world had fallen to ashes, but they built upon the idea of division based on age. Another vision came from this idea that every five years, no more and no less, a person would be presented with two options and told to choose one of the given choices. Within the five years, people would learn to adapt alongside others who made the same decision.

Tessa, a seventeen year old girl, has already made three choices, but her decision was unlike every other person's. No one has ever been known to live the way Tessa had been living for the past seventeen years and lived to tell the tale. Until one day, her secret comes out and her life becomes endangered. And with every step she takes, Tessa knows she's being watched and fears by making one wrong move, she will become death's next victim.

Review:

Cover:

The cover is amazing—your designer managed to cleverly incorporate the most important elements of your story into a single image, without, at the same time, making it look disorganized and chaotic. I wonder whether the fortress is supposed to be the headquarters for the New Union, while both the girl looking into the sunlight and the larger, translucent one, are Tessa. This shows two different sides to the same character. We have that strong side, where she takes charge and picks the choices no one else would dare to while that weaker, more vulnerable side shows how alone she is in the face of so many conformists.

The only downfall here is that fact that you can't really see the title. I feel like it would be better to swap it with the author's name. (Plus, you have the banner taking away the attention from it).

Overall—Eye-catching. 

Blurb:

When I first started reading it, I thought, "wow, another boring old dystopia novel." How many times have I read a story revolving around a dictatorship rising from the ashes of a destroyed world? Countless of times. But things got a little more interesting as I read on—I got some Matrix vibes from the storyline, especially because you kept the nature of the 'two choices' ambiguous. It raises a lot of questions. What does she have to choose between? Material goods? Relationships? I think you should add in some sort of sentence outlining this—"The choices could range from [—] to [—], nothing was set in stone." (Bad example, but I hope you get what I mean).

It happens every five years, so it must be something major—the people there are probably monitored 24/7, as to collect data for this event. It's good that I managed to deduce this simply by reading in-between the lines. You didn't have to go through the whole spiel about how people live in fear, etc. it's all there.

My earlier comment on the nature of the choices also applies to the second paragraph. With a little more detail regarding it, it can make the part where "Tessa, a seventeen-year-old girl, has already made three choices, but her decision was unlike every other person's" clearer.

I can't believe that Tessa is the only one that picked a certain pattern of 'choices' in the entire population. There must be at least a few other people that picked the same things as her, she can't possibly be the only rebel in the whole society. So I think you should reword the last sentence of the first paragraph, "Within the five years, people would [have to] learn to [survive] alongside the others, without knowing whether they shared the same decision with someone else."