Rookywriters Book Reviews

No. 4 Secrets Left Neglected

Introduction

¤ Book title and author - Secrets Left Neglected by WriterAEF
Genre - Romance

¤ First impression - My first impression is about your book description. Maybe you trying to sound a little mysterious but it's just a young adult romance story, there's nothing mysterious about it. A soft romantic summary will best suit the book. I would suggest if you shuffle the sentences and include real, catchy information about your book.

Good story idea, but have the same cliche teen fiction story line.

¤ Weakness - Description! No description of characters. Not even the color of their hair was mentioned.

¤ Improvement - Include description of locations and settings at the beginning of the chapter.

Tell what the characters are wearing, what they are doing and their facial expressions from time to time.

¤ Strengths - Good dialogue with the characters. Good diction and funny scenes to keep readers engaged.

Body

¤ Opening - The prologues gave us a brief story about the main characters. It was great to read about them at the beginning. Good opening.

¤ Conflict -The little 'love/crush' conflict going on was great for a start. It pushed the story forward.

¤ Plot - The plotting of the story is complicated. With new characters popping here and there and dialogues going on, I can't really point the direction where the story is heading to, But... I guess it's heading somewhere.

So in chapter 1D, the only important stuff that happened was that caoilainn kissed Tadhg, I would suggest you move the chapter with 1C, since it's just the continuation.

¤ Settings - 98 percent of the settings in the book was done at the school. It literally got bored at some point. Characters have homes, churches, go to movies, get on buses, go for shopping, and do other interesting things.

¤ Characterization - Siofria, Pearl, Jenny, Walker, Courtney, Archer and caoiainn were all mentioned in chapter 1c. It was too much to keep up with.

Bringing up more than three characters in a chapter means they are doing something really important to move the story forward, otherwise if a character's action is irrelevant to the story don't mention them at all.

Some infos that was spilled in the chapters 3 could have come earlier, like Siofria and Pearl.

Then there was Nick, Gabriel and Ruari and Brody and Fionn and Rachel and Pete all in chapter 8,
It got too much seriously. The names was all over the place.

Limit the number of characters per chapters so that we can keep up with their story.

¤ Dialogue - Good dialogue with the characters but not enough dialogue tags to convey the emotions of the characters when they speak.

¤ Point of View - Point of View switched between the characters. It was written well.

¤ Show versus tell - There was a little balance in the way you told the story and the way the characters portrayed themselves in certain situations.

¤ Format of the text - Good paragraphing. The story was readable.

¤ Grammar and spelling - Good grammar and spelling. Try limit the use and repetition of 'I' in a paragraph.

¤ Style - Writer have a stable writing style.

Conclusion

Comment - Apart from the lack of characters and locations description, you have a well plotted story.

If you can add little descriptions especially on the hair styles, hair color, eye color, body weight and height, mode of dressing on the characters, the chapters will have more life.

I had fun reading...

Thanks for letting me evaluate thy book.

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