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Review by Sunshine: When Hope is Gone

Title: When Hope is Gone

Author: Writer_of_God

Summary: [no score – not added to final score]

Rather than write a traditional summary that discusses stakes, conflict, and characters, you have chosen to stick a long quotation as your blurb. The quotation itself is highly intriguing, with lots of questions about morality and philosophy that, without a doubt, are relevant in your story. If you are, however, going to use the punctuation marks with the quotation, make sure the punctuation is accurate. Whenever you have a new paragraph, but the same speaker is still speaking, you still need quotation marks at the start of that paragraph. So it should look like:

"How do you destroy a monster without becoming one? It's ironic, isn't it, that we believe we're the good guys, at least to some extent. At what point does our fighting crime, become crime? The police in every city do their best, but aren't they the ones who are killing? Yes, they're killing killers, but doesn't that make them killers as well? It's for a good cause though, right? I'm sure they've never misjudged a person...

"If killing for a good cause is right, then when is killing wrong? We all have reasons for what we do and even if deep down we know it's wrong, how hard can it be to come up with a legitimate reason? The only problem now is, how can the police do their job, and how do we as people keep safe and keep others from killing each other just for territory, or revenge?

"Well who knows and who cares anymore. I guess here, at this forgotten college, anything is legal. It's different here, so different. One thousand people with one voice and one cause. Welcome to the rebellion."

Edit: After reading the story, I realise that the summary was not dialogue, but a letter. So, don't worry about the punctuation! 

Grammar: 3/5

Overall, your grammar could definitely use some work. First of all, let's look at some examples and break it down from there:

There were few twinkling stars that night, fewer than usual, everything was near pitch black.

That sentence is a run-on sentence. Basically, a run-on sentence is when you have two independent clauses in one sentence with a comma or nothing to separate them; in this case, since you've used a comma between the 'than usual' and 'everything was', you have a comma splice.

Here is another example:

"Then smash your damn fingers I'm almost there."

Since there is no punctuation between the two independent clauses, it is also a run-on sentence. It should be:

"Then smash your damn fingers. I'm almost there."

Additionally, whenever you use ellipsis, you need to ensure you are using three periods – not four, not two. For example:

It's a stunning cream colour....

It should be:

It's a stunning colour...

Now, the biggest issue I found – and say biggest because this actually disrupted the fluency of the writing and made it difficult to engage with – was your tenses. You kept going back and forth from past to present tense, in both the prologue (the past) and the rest of the chapters (the present). For example:

I saw Hope open her mouth but then close it, realising that we all know where Mother is.

If we break it down: