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Review by Sunshine: The Betrayal

Review by Sunshine: The Betrayal

Author: Rosie_80

Summary: 4/5

Short, simple and sweet. It introduces the main character and also informs the audience about the potential conflict that the story revolves around. The use of rhetorical question was also very effective, so well done! The only issue I had with it was that it was a little too vague when it came to the conflict. We know the past is back and that it involves a secret, but I feel like the tension and drama could have been milked out even more. I don't want to know the secret, but I want to know how dire it is. I want to know why it is challenging the family and why it is so significant.

But, then again, I also noted that this is book two of a series – so maybe, if I had read the first book, the secret would be clearer to me. But, anyways, good job here. 

Grammar: 3/5

Okay, so there were definitely a few grammatical issues that I picked up on that disrupted the fluency of the story. But don't worry – these are easily fixable! The first one is a common mistake that lots of writers make: is it "me and this person" or "this person and I"? There's actually an easy way to remember it. Simply take away the "this person" aspect and see what you have left. For example:

"If me and Scott were in that mess, it was because of her."

In this case, the "this person" aspect is the "and Scott". Now, let's take that away from the sentence and what we have left is:

"If me was in that mess, it was because of her."

As you can see, that above sentence is correct. However, if it was:

"If Scott and I were in that mess, it was because of her."

And then you remove the "Scott and":

"If I was in that mess, it was because of her."

It works perfectly! Therefore, the correct form should be, "If Scott and I were in that mess, it was because of her."

Also, whenever you have dialogue, punctuation should come before the closing inverted commas, and there always must be punctuation before the inverted commas. For example:

"Love you more".

It should be:

"Love you more." 

Character Building: 3/5

Okay, I'll start by saying that I am an absolute sucker for multiple omniscient narrators and perspective switches. For me, it's a good way of seeing the story from different angles and, particularly when it comes to mysteries like these, it helps show the reader how complex each aspect of the plot is. So it was nice to see you use this and slowly add information as we progressed through the story by telling it through another character's voice.

It was also good to see that your characters have flaws. You can't have a story without flawed characters, so well done.

But I do think your characters can be improved. Not personality-wise, but just regarding how they are depicted to the readers. You have to remember that us readers don't know your characters nearly as well as you do. So whenever you have a new narrator, there voice should come with their own idiosyncrasies. They should have different tones and styles to the narration. I always tell people: your voices should be so distinct that, even if the reader didn't have the names of the characters at the top, they would be able to guess who the narrator is.

Writing Style: 2.5/5

Okay, so I found lots of instances of telling instead of showing. I think you should go back and consider fleshing out descriptions of setting more, because there wasn't enough of that, and also consider using figurative language to add richness to the writing. Showing is so much more effective and gripping than telling is (in most circumstances). So instead of saying, "It was about midnight", show it to us! Were the stars the only light that he could see? Was it so dark that it was almost suffocating?

Also, try manipulating sentence structure a bit more. It is really effective to use one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences to emphasise the tension and action – especially in this particular genre. I am glad that you kept everything fast-paced, since the story itself needed that drive, so well done! I do think, however, you can slow down the pace just a tad to really flesh out the characters, add some dialogue tags and facial expressions to counterbalance the heavy amount of dialogue. 

Plot + Uniqueness: 3/5

I loved the plot twists. I loved learning about the past and what drove the characters to do what they did after it was too late – great choices there! I also loved seeing how things backfired for Carla, because I did not foresee any of it.

A lot of the plot twists were discovered in the dialogue itself, which is fine. I just wish you considered alternate ways to shape your story, rather than letting it be driven by dialogue entirely. I encourage you to try different ways of executing plot twists and learning the truth, apart from just characters just saying it?

And a bit of a petty side note: I noticed that you changed the style of the font for the characters? Like bold for this character, italics for this character, bold and italics for this character – I suggest not doing that? You already state the character name at the top of the chapters, and like I said in the section about character, the voices should be so distinct that readers can easily guess. I know this is a petty note, but I do think it would contribute to the professionalism of the story. 

OVERALL SCORE: 15.5/25

Overall, a pretty good story! Well done at keeping it quite fast-paced, and great job at avoiding superfluous details. Just work on your punctuation and adding distinctions to the narrative voices, and you'll be good to go!