Brutally Honest Reviews™

Caught Up

Word Count: 1634

Title: Caught Up

Genre: General Fiction

Blurb: A man faces a tough decision when his life catches up to him in prison. Serving a sentence for attempted murder, he tries to free himself from his old life as a gang member in order to save his future. Will he rise to success, or fall back to his old, dangerous ways?

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Starting Points: 30

Cover: Although it doesn't immediately strike me as a professional/orthodox book cover, I do like it. Personally, I think it fits the books theme, setting, and whatnot. No points lost.

Title: It's catchy, and goes to the point of whatever the hell it's referring to. But, I'm guessing it has to do with crime. I'm not a title interpreter because I don't have the time, but I can definitely look at the cover for context clues. Oh yeah, and the tags.

Summary:

- I truly do hate short summaries, but when they cover everything the readers needs to know and pulls them in—I really can't find any fault.

-My only notes are to add the main character's name.

-Otherwise, I want to read on, congrats!

Plot: Dude is in jail after getting involved in shady business, shady people, and bad mistakes. Shit might come back to ruin his life even further.

-I'm ready!

Opening thoughts:

-This should have been in (limited, to be specific) third person. (-3)

-You're starting far too many sentences with "I," and it's tiring to see. (-3)

-Lord, it's still happening, and it's becoming worse. If I took off one point for every time a sentence began with "I," this review would be so easy to end. Stop this nonsense! This is to everyone who thinks writing repetitive/twin sentences are neat. They aren't. It only shows you're amateur. You really need to be creative with your sentence structures people. Even when I'm reading published books I do this. It literally makes my eye twitch. Fix it, Christ! (-3)

Character:

-Sadly, I'm a bit annoyed.

-The writer themselves is Mexican (yo!), out here repping for their fellow Mexicans, and decided to write about her own. Which I really admire, since there's a lot of writers on here who are POC or black who, for some reason, decide to write about white main characters. This may be my personal bias. However, it really annoys me because if you're not going to take the opportunity to write about characters that are never represented correctly in literature (and you have the standpoint to really know how to do it just from your own real experience?), then who the hell will?!

-Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know POC writers shouldn't feel pressured into writing about "their own" (which is quite sad if the author thinks it's "pressuring/forcing"), but you can't complain when all you see is white characters. I'm not going to blame it solely on the POC/Black writers though since they're conditioned into knowing how to write white characters better than POC characters because of the lack of representation. But, that's for another day of, "Lecturing from 'M' of BHR".

-Any way, that wasn't entirely my point and I got off track. My point is, in this context, you're kind of unknowingly promoting the Mexican stereotype. I'm not talking about sombreros, tacos, or the poncho. No, I'm talking about "Ese/Chico" that comes from Compton and is part of a gang. It's like I'm watching a "serious" version of Next Friday.