Sapphire's Review Store 3.0

Review by Sunshine: You're My Light

Title: You're My Light

Author: NiyatiChaurasia

Reviewer:ray_of_sunshine9

Summary: 3/5

This was one of the first times I've had to review the summary after reading the story, because I was unsure of a few things. However, nonetheless, my first impression when I first read this story was positive – I was immensely captivated. There's humour that is engaging, the rhetorical questions drive the summary forward, and it is immensely interactive with the reader.

The reason I had to read the book before writing about the summary was because, if this summary was for a second-person "choose your own adventure" type of book, it would be perfect. But, because it's not and it's actually a regular book in first person, it's rather misleading.

I do like how interactive the narrator is in the summary, but the issue is that the narrator doesn't appear again – they're not the one telling the story. The first paragraph, while humorous, rambles and could be more succinct – and the constant use of "you" and literally saying "Help Nathan to win Adelle's heart" makes it sound like the story is going to be immensely interactive when it actually isn't. Maybe consider writing "Will Nathan win Adelle's heart?" instead of asking the readers to do it, so that it's not misleading.

Also, you change tenses in the summary:

Adelle's life changes when she got turned into a vampire. [changes = present tense; got turned = past tense]. You need to keep it consistent. I suggest changing 'changes' to 'changed' to make it consistently in past tense, or change the 'got turned' to 'gets turned' to make it consistently in present tense. 

Grammar: 2.5/5

While your story was very easy to read, there were a few consistent errors – and these actually disrupted the flow within your story quite a bit, so I thought it would be good to go through them quickly.

The biggest one was tense. I mentioned it above, and I'll mention it again – your tenses keep fluctuating from past tense to present tense multiple times within a single paragraph. Usually, grammar rules are mostly nit-picky things, but tenses are really important because incorrect tenses can disrupt the fluency of your story and be jarring to rude. For example:

I could literally feel his eyes burning on me. But I can't back out now.

It we break it down:

I could literally feel his eyes burning on me. [could = past tense]

But I can't back out now. [can't = cannot = present tense]

You need to choose one tense and stick to it.

Additionally, let's talk about dialogue and punctuation. When dialogue is followed by a verbal dialogue tag (such as 'he said', 'she whispered', 'they 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 an exclamation mark for an exclamation). For example:

"Last time I checked, yours was perfectly fine." He said with a raised eyebrow.

It should be:

"Last time I checked, yours was perfectly fine," he said with a raised eyebrow.

Also, another rule – proper nouns. Using 'mum and 'dad' can be quite tricky, but basically, when they are used alone, they are considered proper nouns and should be capitalised (Mum/Dad). However, if you include 'my' before it, it's no longer considered a proper noun and does not need to be capitalised (my mum/my dad). So, for example: