Sapphire's Review Store 2.0

Review by Sunshine: The Coldest Summer

Title: The Coldest Summer

Author: Geegervy

Summary: 3/5

Your summary is very succinct, but still effectively shows the character, as well as the conflict that will begin to arise, so well done! The genre is very clear, I like the rhetorical question at the end, and the progression of ideas is great.

However, there were quite a few things I noted. First of all, if you're going to include an excerpt from the novel, make sure it is grammatically correct (I'll discuss this further in the next section). In fact, your whole summary needs polishing. First of all:

When Kira Jones finally decides to take a six-week summer vacation; her best and only friend Samantha drags her into a trip out of California where her life takes a serious turn.

Your use of semicolon is incorrect, as the first clause is not an independent clause. For the purpose of fluency, you should surround 'Samantha' with commas, and you should add punctuation before the life taking a serious turn. Consider:

When Kira Jones finally decides to take a six-week summer vacation, her best and only friend, Samantha, drags her on a trip out of California – where her life takes a serious turn.

Then:

She meets a mysterious Ranch owner whom her...

Ranch does not need to be capitalised.

What would win in the end between power of love and friendship?

By saying 'would', you've suddenly reverted into past tense even though the rest of your summary is in present tense. You need to keep it consistent.

Also, I think it might be beneficial to highlight the stakes – a short simple line that says what will happen if things go wrong. Does Kira risk losing her best friend? It might be worthwhile to have a powerful line that shows that she is torn between love and friendship.

Grammar: 3/5

Overall, your grammar wasn't too bad. Reading your story was very easy, and the fluency wasn't impacted heavily by errors. However, there were definitely a few moments where the reading experience was slowed simply because of errors. Don't worry – I'll go through some of them with you.

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:

"They're my guests, not yours." Liam replies.

It should be:

"They're my guests, not yours," Liam replies.

Additionally, you have moments, as mentioned in the summary, where you switch tenses from present to past. For example:

I interrupt her PG-rated talk. [interrupt = present tense]

Frankly, I only wanted to spend my six weeks at home. [wanted = past tense]

Make sure your tenses are consistent.

Next, let's talk about capital letters. You seem to be a little all over the place, and sometimes, they seem like typos, but other times, they don't. Let's look at some examples: