Rookywriters Book Reviews

No. 16 Enemies Forever

Introduction

¤ Book title and author - Enemies forever by dazzlingmeteors
Genre: Teen fiction

¤ First impression - Title... From the summary, if Christian and Hailey finally dated each other to see why their families are enemies, then they will not be 'enemies forever' anymore.

Will they?
Or are they?

¤ Weakness - Short sentences, fast paced writing and incomplete sentences.

¤ Improvement - Limit the use of short sentences especially when characters are not performing any intriguing or mysterious actions.

Calm down when writing and take your time to build a chapter.

¤ Strengths -Good story idea. Good chapter of words.

Body

¤ Opening - Starting the first chapter with some dialogue that will not make any relevance to the rest of the story is not advisable.

First chapters have to be really good and catchy to grip readers.

¤ Conflict - The conflict in the story which is about Hailey's parents hatred towards Christian's family was supposed to be properly developed so that readers could get an idea of what caused the hatred, like it was said in the summary.

¤ Plot - Story plotting is done well.

¤ Setting - Good settings to the story.

¤ Characterization -Characters are relatable.

¤ Dialogue - Dialogues are short and cue off at some point. The characters all sound the same when they speak. There is no tone difference between who is talking, a girl or boy.

¤ Point of View -The story is written from the first person pov which is Hailey. But the voice is totally the writers voice screaming all through the book.

When a writer invest her voice so much in writing it comes off as rants to the reader. The characters suddenly seems invisible.

Learn to differentiate your writing voice from a character's tone.

¤ Show versus tell - Example in chapter one

School ended five minutes ago and carter drove us to our house and we left him alone.

This is telling.

It was about five minutes after school when we got into Carter's car. We drove home in silent as everyone of us was exhausted of the day's activities. On getting home, we abandoned Carter at the sitting room and rushed upstairs with Bree to get ready for the party.

Not too perfect but this is showing.

Learn the difference and know when it's necessary to show what is happening in a scene.

¤ Format of the text - Paragraphing was done properly. Chapter length was normal but at a certain point it got shorter.

¤ Grammar and spelling - There was rampant switch from present tense to past tense.

Example somewhere in chapter one,

The clock strikes six thirty and we were ready to go.
We got into Carter's car and it took five minutes to reach the party.

When editing work on the tenses and know which one suits your story best.

Try limiting the use of 'I' in a paragraph. It gets too much at some point. Chapter four,

*I smacked my stupid alarm clock because it freaking annoys me. I woke up and groaned. I'm not a morning person and I groaned every time I woke up. *

Also when editing try reading the chapters aloud that way you can hear the words used in the sentences clearly. And know the irrelevant words to cut out.

¤ Style - Writing style is not stable yet. The whole actions seems to be happening in fast forward mode which is quite shocking.

Conclusion
Comments - Enemies forever as a title is quite ironic compared to the content of the story. Well, at the end I don't know if the couple will get together or not but I hoped to see more serious problems within the families but it seemed they all looked fine to me.

The 'enemy' part of the story is kinda lost somewhere but it's a real good story.

I enjoyed reading your book.

Thanks for letting me evaluate your book.

Any comments or questions about any confusion just PM me or hit the comments.