Sapphire's Review Store 2.0

Review by Sunshine: Melody Starr

Title: Melody Starr

Author: AlexaZedler

Summary: 5/5

I love your summary. I think you've done a great job at introducing the protagonist and conflict with a sense of urgency and intrigue. As soon as I finished reading the summary, I wanted to click that read button and get on with it – which is a great sign! You've got a fantastic use of rhetorical question at the end, I love the symbolism of her life being a book, and the clipped sentences in the middle were very powerful.

My only suggestion?

...Melody is forced to confront the frightening truth.....

Please make sure your ellipsis at the end only has three periods, not five. 

Grammar: 3/5

As I mentioned again, ellipsis only require three periods – not five. So please make sure that remains consistent. Otherwise, your grammar wasn't too bad; the story itself was easy to read and follow. However, there were quite a few things I noticed.

First of all, dialogue and punctuation. If dialogue is followed by a verbal dialogue tag (such as 'he said', 'she whispered', 'she exclaimed' – or anything referring to how the character says the words), there should be a comma before the closing inverted commas. If it's anything else, this comma should be replaced by a period (or a question mark for a question and exclamation mark for an exclamation). For example:

"Morning Rachel." I say with a small smile.

It should be:

"Morning Rachel," I say with a small smile.

Next, while we are still on dialogue, if there is only dialogue in a paragraph (with nothing surrounding it), the dialogue should still end with a full-stop. For example:

"Be safe, blueberry,"

You need a full-stop instead of a comma. Additionally, Blueberry is basically what he is calling Melody, so it should be capitalised as a proper noun (especially since you capitalised it in earlier chapters). It should be:

"Be safe, Blueberry."

You're also mixing up tenses every now and then. You're mostly in present tense, but you sometimes drift off into past tense. For example:

I put on my poker face. [put = present tense]

The doctor gazed at me for a few seconds. [gazed = past tense]

You need to make sure your tenses are consistent.

Overall, you had quite a few typos here and there. I didn't write them all down, however, here are a few examples:

...shaking my head for the I-don't-know-what th

time today.

It should not be split into two lines. It should simply be:

...shaking my head for the I-don't-know-what time today.

A misspelling:

"Oh," Shee sounds disappointed.

Which should also be:

"Oh." She sounds disappointed.

You also kept spelling Los Angeles as 'Los Angelos'. I encourage you to go back and fix that up.