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Review by Gnome: For Those Who Don't Believe in Love Songs

Title: For Those Who Don't Believe in Love Songs

Author: david_hull

Reviewer: GnomeMercy

Summary: 5/5

That summary was amazing! It really pulled me in, and I was extremely excited to read this story! You had everything there: characters, setting, stakes, and dilemma. Well done!

There was a small sentence I thought was in need of a comma. Here is the corrected version (commas in bold):

This was not their first meeting, but roughly their 200th, due to James' remarkable condition...

Of course, they aren't strictly necessary, and this is just me being nit-picky, but it does read a little easier.

Grammar: 3.5/5

In terms of grammar, your first chapters were actually very clean! Well done. Just keep a look out for typos and small errors that I know you probably didn't do on purpose. There were quite a bit of double spacing, missing speech marks, and smaller things like that which I noticed later on into the story. (I suggest you do a quick reread to find them as there were some consistency errors, too, such as "DiMonte" being spelt "Dimonte" from time to time.)

Here are some recurring errors I noticed, however:

"Never mind" is actually two words. I did some research, and while a lot of people use "nevermind", that's not the proper spelling.

Secondly, and this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine (which I'm pretty infamous for, too), anything like: ?!, !!, ?? are actually grammatically incorrect. Multiple exclamation marks/question marks are used a lot, even in published books, but they're actually not grammatically correct. Instead, I recommend you incorporate the emphasis in the verbal tag or maybe even italicise it.

Other than that, your writing was quite clean. After chapter 7, I did notice quite a few more typos than the first chapters, but that is understandable. As stated before, I do recommend a quick sweep to clean those out. Well done, however!

Characters: 5/5

Okay, wow. This was definitely your strongest point. I remember starting this story thinking Martha didn't have too much personality, but her snark and her love for James definitely changed all that as I knew her more. When her mother's secret was revealed, we got a wonderful depiction of her personality. I think there's a lot she keeps hidden, but it was all revealed beautifully.

Usually, I hate the love interest. I think they're not developed or simply bland, but James wasn't like that at all. The toll of living about 250 lives was clear to me, and you did a great job of showing that. His relationship with Martha was the sweetest thing ever, I loved their chemistry (bad science pun intended). Well done!

(Also, Camisha and Calvin were hilarious. I absolutely loved their relationship with each other, too. Good job when it came to giving them a '90s feel, too. I definitely felt that throughout the book.)

Writing Style: 3/5

I think this was definitely your weakest point. I'm not saying your writing is bad, because it wasn't at all, but there were somethings I thought you could work on to improve it.

A general thing was that some things did go a little quickly towards the end. I recommend doing a quick reread to see for yourself if things are a little unclear.

My two main problems were similar sentence structure and redundancy. While your writing was easy to read, and I was absolutely in love with the science-y stuff because I am an absolute nerd, I did feel as if you didn't use a wide variety of sentence types.

Quite a lot of your sentences were simple, in the beginning especially, and that made your writing sound a little robotic. I recommend using more conjunctions and commas to make your sentences more complex and in-depth, as well as a few more descriptions here and there. Here's an example of some similar sentence structures:

She put on...

She hit fast forward...

She hit play...

It's acceptable if these similar sentences appear together twice, but three times is when it really gets noticeable. Mixing things up a bit really helps when it comes to trying to use different sentence structures.

Another problem was redundancy. That's basically when you repeat a word a lot in a sentence or paragraph. I don't have an example from your story as I didn't write it down, but I'll show you an example so you know what you're looking for.

Say you're describing the sky. A description filled with redundant sentences would look a bit like this:

The sky was very blue. Sunlight streamed from the sky, golden and shimmering. It was a pretty sight to see, bright and never-ending. Skies always filled me with wonder...

Here, the word "sky" is repeated a lot. Try rephrasing the sentence or using synonyms to change it up a bit of you see yourself doing this. I saw a tiny bit of this in your writing, so I just wanted to show you what to look out for and how to improve your descriptions.

Other than that, you had a very nice style! It flowed well, and I understood quite a bit of what was going on. Work on a few things, and you'll have an amazing way of writing!

Plot: 5/5

When I read the summary, I already knew I would adore this story—and I did! The plot was pretty amazing. That ending hit me really hard, and I was really into the science behind it all (I didn't understand some parts of the science, but that's probably my fault since I am quite young). Good job! My only qualm would be that you did skip quite a few months from time to time. I understand that whatever happened during that time was probably unimportant, but I'm the sort of person who enjoys a lot of development. (That's probably only me though.) I, personally, recommend some more chapters on their relationship only (so we see more on how they grow to care for each other—well, for James it's caring more), but I can understand why it's also not as necessary due to the fact James has done it at least 200 hundred times before.

Other than that nit-pick, I have nothing else to say. A wonderful plot!

OVERALL SCORE: 21.5/25

I think you have a wonderful story! The feel of it was amazing, the plot so intriguing, and the characters were developed quite well. I recommend a quick grammar clean up as there were some small errors, but other than that, it was very clean! I will most definitely be reading the sequel as I enjoyed it so much! Hope this helped.