Book: Their Fall

Author: s_u_ciara172

Chapters Read: 1-7

Review By: divvyrora

Book Review

At a Glance:

Cover: Absolutely. Love. The. Cover. I'm not entirely sure why, but the minute I laid my eyes on it... I was blown away. It's so simple but so powerful. It's unique in some aspects, and the title really pops out on the cover because of the font/color choice. It's also not a typical Canva cover that you often find on Wattpad, which is refreshing.

Blurb: In my first read-through of the blurb, I noticed that you switched back and forth between past and present tense. It's a harmless mistake, but it can distract a lot of readers, leading them away from your book if they think that the writing is going to accidentally change tense often. With that being said, your blurb needs some fixing up. It's okay as it is, it sure reels readers in, but work needs to be done to fully hook, line, and sinker potential readers. Not on,y do I recommend making some changes in word choice, I recommend shortening it. Below I have your original blurb, and below each paragraph, I have bolded the edits I would recommend making:

Original: She didn't see the future coming in the form of a handsome neighbor, until it came and wrecked everything in her life.

Edits: Did she see the future coming in the form of a handsome neighbor? No. But did he come and wreck everything in her life? Maybe.

Original: Lily didn't ask for the shaman's views of her apartment or how 'cursed' it is. She didn't ask for a new neighbor who's creepy and is giving off major serial killer vibes. She didn't ask for any of the events that take place after that. And above all, she never wanted a war.

Edits: Lily didn't ask for a 'cursed' apartment. She didn't ask for a new neighbor with major serial killer vibes. And she definitely didn't ask for any of the events that took place after that. But above all, she never wanted a war.

Original: But what's life if it gives you only that which you asked for?

Edits: But what's life it only gives you what you ask for?

And that's all! I think that this edited blurb creates a lot more suspense than your original blurb, and keeping it short and sweet might help attract readers. If you would like to use this edited blurb, go for it! If not, that's completely okay, but take a look at my suggestions to improve your current blurb.

Tags: Honestly, this isn't a section to worry too much about, but I'm including this because tags can be quite important- especially on Wattpad when you're trying to gain reads. It entirely depends on the purpose of your book, and whether you want it discovered by others. Right away I can see that you have 24 tags on your story. Wattpad has a maximum of 25 tags/story. I recommend you go for the full maximum of tags, so just add one more, and you should be good. Now let's focus on the quality of your tags and how well they showcase your story, helping it get discovered by others. From a glance, you seem to have chosen great tags to represent your story. These tags have a greater pool of stories within, and ranking high in these larger tags makes it easier for your story to be found, and to be read by a greater audience. That being said, I noticed you also had a few tags with a few hundred stories using the same tag. I'd recommend keeping those tags as having these smaller tags can help your story get discovered with a small pool of people.

Chapter 1 Assessment:

I choose to focus on the first chapter in a book and give a thorough review of how readers get a hold of your writing style. It's significant if you want readers to continue reading your reading. In your case, I'm assessing 'Tacky' for the assessment.

Engagement: I liked the size of your chapter. To me, it felt just right, because, at times, I don't particularly enjoy scrolling through pages and pages of a single chapter. You really tackled the conflict in this first chapter which is a great way to start. I have to say though, the first paragraph was a little distracting, and it didn't exactly reel me in like I thought it would. There's honestly so much going on there, it threw me off a bit. Breaking down the info, splitting the paragram, and cutting down on some words in that first paragraph alone would really help readers comprehend the scene a little better. Without that, it might be a little hard for the readers to fully grasp what's going on. I decided to put this under engagement because it's really important for the readers to understand what the author is trying to convey. Again, there were times throughout this chapter where I wasn't really able to. I think this is because we as readers are seeing a lot of the main character's inner monologue, and while that's great, I think that's slightly overdone in this area. Not only that, but it's going back and forth from the monologue to what's happening in the scene, and I think that it's confusing. So maybe you can italicize the inner monologue thoughts to make it a bit distinctive from what's going on in the scene? Again, I'm putting this under engagement because at times the inner monologue takes away from what's going on in the book, and this was quite confusing for me to read through.

Grammar/Spelling: From a glance, I don't really see that many grammatical issues, so you seem to be good at it in this section! Remember to always look it over though with spell check, Grammarly, etc.

Word Choice: I briefly focused on this in the engagement section, but I feel as if some parts of the text are really wordy. It could just seem like that because there are points in time where the text is just clumped together, but I guess that's an organizational thing. For the inner monologue, I like the casual tone you've set, but maybe it's a little too casual. So while I like the use of casual words to make the character feel alive, and more real, I think at times you overdid it.

Entire Text's Story Flow:

I actually really liked the flow of your story. It was moving along quite fast, yet you included the necessary details at the right time. The best part is, you kept your suspense, adding small snippets of clues as the story progressed, making it more interesting to read. You ended your chapters appropriately, not really stopping in the middle of a scene unless there was a "bomb drop" sort of effect, which was nice.

Overall Plot:

I have enjoyed your plot thus far. I'm really happy to see a story that surrounds a female boxer. Well, I've come across a lot of female boxer stories, but all of those are quite the same. The girl wants to learn to fight, so she goes to a guy and etc etc. While those are fine, those can be quite repetitive. Your main character was independent and seemed to learn boxing for herself, but not to defend herself, but to fight back... and I liked that very much. We even saw her put her boxing to use a little when she thought that someone broke into her studio. But other than that, you got a mix of vibes going on here. You got a little bit of horror with the voices she's been hearing, perhaps some supernatural events with the whole Arianna & Amos thing, and of course you have action. It's great, it truly is, and I think that the plot is really unique as to what I've read in the past.

Entire Text's Sentence Structure (description, grammar, spelling):

For the most part, you seem to have this well handled. When reading, I didn't catch many errors. You had well enough spelling and grammar. There were a few times where I caught minor mistakes in capitalization, spelling, etc but I believe I commented on those in the book itself. Otherwise, in that department, you're set!! Just double-check your writing :)

For descriptions, they're also well done, although at times they're overdone, like in the earlier chapters. It's a lot like clumping a ton of information together, and it makes the text wordy, not so fun to read. To prevent this, you can space out information throughout the book, or you can simply cut on the descriptions that aren't necessary. After all, you don't really need to describe every little thing.

Closing Thoughts:

Overall I thought that your text was well done. Yes, I had some issues with it, like the descriptions and the first chapter, but again, it all came together as I progressed through the book. Great job, and I wish you the best of luck in your future writing endeavors! Also, feel free to comment throughout the review if you have any questions about anything.

Overall Rating: B+