Author: AsheraJones

Book title: Broken By Design

Title

I like the title, but I don't think it fits the story. I suppose "broken" is referring to Olive, but I didn't see a broken girl; a sad girl with a terrible boyfriend, yes, but not a broken girl.

Cover

Outstanding cover! Great colors and the title is big enough and is right in the center of the cover. The only thing I'm not 100% excited about is the sentence at the top because the half right isn't legible unless zooming in (I'm using Wattpad via desktop). So maybe another color would work better because both the words and the background are white.

(After reading the story) Up until the last chapter, Olivia is the protagonist. Why is there a boy on the cover? Shouldn't there be a girl?

Blurb

I'm going to analyze your blurb line by line:

I don't think your blurb needs the first line (the dialogue). If you keep it, put a full stop after "change".

I didn't understand the word "facade" in "Olivia Garcia facade has a perfect life,". It doesn't make sense here. Is it a typo? I don't think it belongs there. I believe you meant to say that she pretends to have a perfect life, that her perfect life is a lie. It would be better to say "No one sees the lies behind Olivia Garcia's life. They see her perfect life, her perfect friends, her perfect boyfriend, but everything is a mask (or a façade if you prefer)."

I also don't understand the "fragile kid" part. Do they treat her like that because she's "perfect"?

The rest of the blurb has some run-on sentences [=two or more independent clauses that are connected improperly]. By the way, it's "best friend", not "bestfriend". So, the next sentence could be: "However, there's someone who treats her differently: Tristan Hendrix, her boyfriend's best friend. He's always annoyed by her presence, and she thinks he's rude and that he will never accept her. [In the blurb, you suddenly mention a Chase. I guess that he's the boyfriend, but you haven't mentioned him before.] But everything changes when her life turns upside down."

The story looks simple and the blurb doesn't have the element of surprise. There are thousands if not millions of stories with an MC (=main protagonist) who has a perfect, fake life and someone hates her until everything changes. Your blurb doesn't have something that will make it unique or different from most of the stories of this genre.

Prologue

You don't have to put "(prologue)" before the text. The title of the chapter is enough.

The second line could be omitted. The previous sentence shows that they are taller than her, so the second line is unnecessary.

I don't mind the length of the prologue, but do you think it was necessary? Because I don't. Not every story needs a prologue. Yes, the prologue is very important, but only when the story needs one. If the story makes sense without the prologue, if you can use all the information from the prologue in the main story and if you are writing a prologue because it's a trend, then you shouldn't have a prologue.

As I'm writing this, I haven't yet read anything more from your story, but I'm certain that you can include how Olivia and Tristan met inside the main story.

Plot

I'll have to be honest with you. The girl with the "perfect" life and the "cheater" boyfriend has been written many times in the past. It's a cliché plot story. When I read the blurb, I thought the story was going to be about a very rich, beautiful girl that everyone fears, but I saw a naïve girl instead. I liked that you added her problem with acme and her insecurity about makeup. That made her character more realistic. But I don't know why you chose to make her be with Chase even though she knows he's a cheater. I'm sure many women stay with their man after he's cheated, but Chase doesn't show any redemption if only Olivia feels insecure and sometimes strange when he's around her.

Another thing I didn't understand is how she saw Chase flirting with the singer and didn't react. At first, she thought she didn't like it and then, suddenly, she was okay with that.

Now, on more technical issues, you spent 7 paragraphs explaining how everyone is constantly consuming and spending time shopping, and then the protagonist does exactly the same. 7 paragraphs to show that your protagonist wants to dress nicely and how she dresses that day is too much. It's not exciting, it's not interesting, and most stories begin with the protagonist getting dressed in the morning. So, you might want to change that or at least, reduce the number of lines you spend on it.

Another problem is the info dump. Instead of slowly introducing the characters, you rush up and give a ton of information in a single paragraph. In chapter 1, when Olivia enters the classroom and sees Joshua, there's this paragraph: "Joshua has light, brown... around me." There are 5 clues in two and a half lines: 1) His hair color, 2) He had a haircut two months ago, 3) She would play with his hair when it was longer, 4) The type of cut he has, 5) He looks good.

Finally, every time you write something, one of the most important questions you should ask yourself is: do my readers need to know all of it?

Characters

Josh is my favorite character. He's sweet and caring. I thought he was in love with Olivia, but I might be wrong. In either case, I really like him.

Olivia's relationship with her mother troubled me. I understand she's close with her, but showing her the pics Chase sent, especially the naked ones, is strange. If it happens in real life, it's also wrong. Olivia doesn't have any privacy, any chance to think about herself without her mother, her boyfriend, or his friends making the decisions about her for her.

Tristan is a complicated character. I'm not sure what he feels about Olivia, but he admitted that he wonders why he's friends with Chase but still talks to him.

I liked how you portrayed Chase, even though I didn't like his character. He's an egoist that plays with girls and bullies his friends (It's subtle, but his behavior is bullying).

All in all, I wonder why the first three characters are close to Chase when no one feels safe or loved by him. It's not realistic that neither of the three of them is strong enough to stand up to Chase, especially Tristan who seems to have an attitude.

SPaG

Don't forget to use a comma when addressing someone. Sometimes you used it, sometimes you don't. For example, in the prologue, there should be a comma after "Olivia" in the first line and after "Tristan and Josh" in the second dialogue.

Don't forget to use the full stop at the end of the sentences. Also, when using a dialogue tag, end the dialogue with a comma and don't capitalize the next letter. For example, in the prologue, it should be: "So, where did you guys meet?" he questions.

Also, the first few paragraphs of chapter 1 had too many run-on sentences. Use more full stops and don't have a 4 or 5-lines long sentence. One very long sentence is "We spend thousands...fast-food restaurant." and the second is "I've tried on ten different shirts, and I've hated how all of them fit with the skirt, this is one of the many days, I wish school had uniforms." The first sentence can break into two independent sentences, but the most confusing one is the second example. Especially the comma before "...this is one of the many days" is wrong. This is more correct: "I've tried on ten different shirts, and I hated how all of them fit with the skirt. It's just another day that I wish school had uniforms."

I noticed you use a lot of the dialogue tag "question". It's nice that you want to have a variety, but in a scene, during 7 lines of dialogue there were 3 "questions". "Ask" works too.

There are some grammatical mistakes. I'm no expert (English isn't even my first language) so I suggest asking help from an editor, studying, and using apps like Grammarly to help you at least at first. Here are a couple of mistakes I wrote down:

· In chapter 1, in the second paragraph, the semi-colon is incorrect. There should be a comma after "In this generation".

· In chapter 4, it should be "she's more annoying than Tristan.", not "annoyed". And "but her I can tolerate." should be "But I can tolerate her."

Overall impression

All in all, I believe your story needs a lot of editing. I believe that your writing is strongly influenced by many trending stories on Wattpad because the plot and the archetypes of the characters are imitating other stories. I suggest, reading more stories, preferably not from Wattpad, to see how other people write without using cliché plots. By the way, a cliché plot isn't bad, as long as you find ways to make it interesting and unique, using your writing style.

Wish you luck!