Rookywriters Book Reviews

No. 2 It approaches Slowly

Introduction

¤ Book title and author - It Approaches Slowly by DarkChocolate_786
Genre - Horror, Romance

¤ First impression - Chapter one is written perfectly. No cliches. No boring narrative.

¤ Weakness - Only weakness notable is not enough descriptions of characters and locations.

There is need to know where they are what's happening there, are other people around, how's the environment, what the characters are wearing, skin tone, hairstyles and their voices at certain time of the day.

¤ Improvement - You can convey more emotions with your characters by using dialogue tags. And also describe how the person looks when he or she is speaking.

¤ Strengths - Very strong narrative style of writing. The scenes and actions are well described and your choice of words suits the story perfectly.

Body

¤ Opening - The first few sentences of the first chapter grabbed my attention. The fact that the family is moving to a new house already created a suspense on what to expect at the new house.

¤ Conflict - In chapter two there is a new neighbor and and issue of dead animals with their ripped off was enough to create conflicts in the story. It's up to the Joey to find out why the animals died and what killed them. Nice. Also the dreams joey had was quite vivid.

¤ Plot - The story plot was going well until chapter six, it seems the mysterious tempo about the story began to drop.

The plot twist switched from animal with ripped heads to dangerous woods.

Then the last chapter introduced Joey's hallucinations. I hope all this plot twist will lead somewhere interesting.

For horrors like this, the atmosphere is supposed to be filled with more scenes and more scary actions from other characters or other things happening within the neighborhood. My suggestion anyway.

¤ Setting - For the settings, there is little description of the background of the story. Like the location of the woods, the home, location of their home, is the area deserted, are there other buildings, schools, in the area?  Etc
Also there is need to know the timing when events happen and what is the weather like, and what time of the year.

¤ Characterization - The fact that Aiden calls Joey, Blueberry is quite intriguing. It's a fun fact about Aiden. Joey is the inquisitive type, very alert in her environment and smart. Good character development.

¤ Dialogue - Most of the dialogues with characters was good, but some felt rather short and the information was not passed in a natural way. Example in chapter seven when Joey saw the girl hanging upside down in the bathroom and she went to tell her sister...

"Sera... Sera... Wake up! You have to see this..." I shook my sister frantically arousing her from her slumber.

"What is it?"she said lazily in an angry and agitated tone.

"At the washroom..." I muttered still panicking. My hands were getting sweaty with fear.

"What's at that bathroom, Joey?" my sister asked rubbing the sleep off her round eyes.

"Someone... A girl... She's dead... I saw her." I started sobbing because I couldn't imagine the pain of being hung upside down and dead.

"You don't have to cry. Are you sure, you saw something?" Sera climbed out the bed. She bravely walked towards the door

"Yes... Up at the ceiling. Wait where are you going?"

Here you go...so this version of mine gives the scene life and makes the event more relatable.

So take your time to really put down the steps people would communicate with each other about an issue, so that it feels natural.

¤ Point of View -The story is written form the first person pov and was done quite professionally. The writer's strong tone worked well with the main character.

¤ Show versus tell - Halfway into the story, we keep seeing Joey going to bed and waking up. I think there's no use to write about it since readers already know her daily routine. You can add more intriguing action to keep the story going forward.

¤ Format of the text -The story is written properly with good paragraphs and descriptive sentences.

¤ Grammar and spelling - Good spelling. When writing the dialogues, the commas should come in before the quotation closes.
Example

"I have to go home. My parents will wake up soon,"

Not

"I have to go home. My parents will wake up soon",

The comma or full stop will be inside the text then the quotation closes.

¤ Style - You have a strong narrative style of writing that could work well of you write for the third person pov.

Conclusion

Good and catchy title. The summary was done quite well. The book cover is very creative and attractive. Your story is fresh with a good concept. You worked the cliffhangers well for each chapter and I hope the tempo continues to grow. As you write more chapters let the suspense continue growing while the main characters continue to piece the puzzles together.

I enjoyed reading the book.

Thanks for letting me evaluate thy book.

Any comments or questions just DM me or hit the comments.

Bang!