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Review by Sunshine: The Saga: Sucker for Pain

Title: The Saga: Sucker for Pain

Author: lee-louw

Summary: 3/5

I'm definitely intrigued by this summary – it leaves so many unanswered questions that I'm just itching to hurry up and flip through the pages. You've started off this summary in a rather dramatic way, which I think works wonderfully, because it immediately draws my attention. Just a few notes:

You're missing commas. It actually made the summary quite confusing to read. For example, let's look at the following sentence:

"Amelia not being under her mother's wing was not something to be referred to as leaving the nest but rather escaping prison."

To make it less clunky, it should be:

"Amelia not being under her mother's wing was not something to be referred to as 'leaving the nest,' but, rather, 'escaping prison.'"

You also need to make sure that your final sentence ends with a question mark, since it is a question.

Next: your summary, while it leaves a lot of unanswered questions and intrigues the reader, might be a little too vague. I genuinely have little idea regarding what the main conflict is and what the stakes are. Maybe try drawing that out – is the main conflict that Amelia has gone missing? What does the whole car/house switch supposed to mean, and what is the relevance in the story? It's just a little unclear.

Once that's polished up, though, your summary will be great. 

Grammar: 2.5/5

Okay, so, I think you might need to go back and polish over quite a few things in terms of grammar and punctuation. Let's go through them now, shall we?

"Nightmares had given her space to breath..."

In that above sentence, you've used the noun, as opposed to the verb. It should be:

"Nightmares had given her space to breathe..."

Next, commas. I mentioned this above in the summary section, but you have quite a few run-on sentences here and there. I recommend that you go over your story, read it aloud, and read it according to the punctuation you have written. If you feel like a pause needs to be added for the sentence to make sense, add some form of punctuation. For example:

"Grief changes face that's all."

I definitely think there are two clauses in that sentence, so it should be:

"Grief changes face. That's all."

Another example:

"She gave up trying to find what guys, even girls saw when looking at her..."

Again, that sentence doesn't quite make sense. It should be:

"She gave up trying to find what guys – or even girls – saw when looking at her..."

Next, let's talk about tenses. For the most part, I think you're in past tense, but you occasionally switch to present tense for no particular reason within a single paragraph. For example, you wrote:

"She's never seen him yell before." [she's = she has = present tense]

Followed by:

"She yelled right back at him." [yelled = past tense]

You need to choose one tense and stick to it. In that example above, it should be, "she had never seen him yell before."

Now, let's talk dialogue. When you have more than one character speaking, you need to separate their dialogue so that each character has their own paragraph for their dialogue. For example, you wrote: