Reviewer: Clair (Maggie-Nary)

Requester: So Far Away by Maleesha_M

'So Far Away'

Before I begin, I would like to note on this review that I don't include the book cover in my reviews, though it is one of the criteria we have to look at. Therefore, the cover will also not be included for the over all score to be fair.

Nonetheless, I also believe our review shop allows for the writers to request another review from a different reviewer after the first one they requested is published, so you can take this option if you also want your cover to be a part of the review right after this.

Title: 4.8/5

The title of this book is good, and I haven't read other stories under this genre with the same title—at least there is none that I can recall at this moment. Still, I think it can still be improved a little, though it isn't really necessary for you to change it right now since it fits the story well.

Summary: 3.9/5

The elements I'm looking for a blurb are all there, but I think there are some parts of it that has to be changed a bit to match the story and to add reasons for readers to be curious. Then, if you will be able to polish your grammar, that's better.

Grammar and Punctuation: 2.8/5

Just as I mentioned, there are a lot of grammar mistakes throughout the story, but it's not something to be scared about. Fortunately, the story can still be understood despite all of those mistakes. I know you've already warned your readers about your English, but still, I hope you are in the business of improving yourself in this area instead of simply apologizing for it.

Let me help you find where to improve first. Don't worry; this shouldn't be that difficult for you, especially the things I will point out in this area are just basic grammar. I've always said that I'm not a grammar nazi and native English speaker, so my insights are just as good as my knowledge can allow.

Let's start with dialogue tags. See my example below.

"John." She sneered before I even finished.

This should be: "John," she sneered before I even finished.

Actually, I think it's better if you change that tag, or simply remove some part of it to improve how it reads. Still, like what I always do in my reviews, I give this set of reminders about tagging dialogues.

If the dialogue ends with a dialogue tag such as said, replied, yelled, and answered, put a comma inside the quotation mark unless it is a question or an exclamation. The pronoun or the next word after the dialogue except for (I) and a name must be in lowercase. On the other hand, If the dialogue ends with action tags like giggle, smile, frown, laugh, or any other description that has nothing to do with the character's speech, put a period, or a full stop inside the quotation mark, when it is not a question or an exclamation. Moreover, the word or the pronoun other than (I) and a name should begin with uppercase letter.

The same rules shall also be applied when your tags are written before the dialogue begins. If it is an action tag, put full stop before the dialogue, then put a comma if it is a dialogue tag. Lastly, there's no need to put a comma or any punctuation mark after the second quotation mark.

This time, I'll proceed to prepositions, though I'll be using another dialogue as an example.

"Who said I'm waiting on a guy?" My cheeks grew red, and I looked away from being disclosed.

This should be: "Who said I'm waiting for a guy?" My cheeks grew red, and I looked away for being disclosed.

That one there can also be improved, but I'll leave it for you to figure out how.

Next thing that I'd like to point out is your narrative tense. You should not mix pass and present narrative tenses, and choose one that fits your story better. But if ever you're not sure what I'm talking about, I'll just show it to you.

After I entered my house, I sat down at my bedside table and wrote a post about my school's lockdown and the holiday because a few days ago i announced that i am taking a break from wattpad due to the exam. and since now there is no exam i can comfortably join wattpad. I have no idea when it will be over but I'm positive it'll mean no school for a while. After I finished my announcement, I went to bathe before settling down and watching some anime.

Well, there's a lot to fix in that one, but let's talk about more of those after this.

After I entered my house, I sat down at my bedside table and wrote a post about my school's lockdown and the holiday because a few days ago i had announced that i was taking a break from wattpad due to exam. and since now there was no exam i could comfortably join wattpad. I had no idea when it would be over but I was positive it would mean no school for a while. After I finished my announcement, I went to bathe before settling down and watching some anime.

'Is' = present narrative tense, and 'was' = past narrative tense.

Most of the verbs you're using were in past tense, so I assume that it should be in past narrative, based on the example I made. You can do otherwise if I'm wrong.

Now, like I said earlier, we have to fix another visible problem in that passage above, and it's called, run on sentence. There are some minor errors as well, but I'll just let you see it for yourself after I make my own revision of that.

After I entered my house, I went straight to my room and sat down at my bedside table to write a post about my school's lockdown and the holiday. A few days ago, I have announced that I was taking a break from wattpad due to exam, and since now there would be no exam i could comfortably join wattpad. I had no idea when it would be over, but I was positive we wouldn't be in school for a while. Once I finished my announcement, I went to bathe before settling down to watch some anime.

I know it's not the best, but I hope it helps you understand how can you fix some parts with the same issue, especially run on sentences.

Next thing I'm pointing out has something to do with modal verbs. See this one below.

Pathum: Are you curious?

Scarlet: No, why wouldn't I be?

The second one should be: 'No, why would I be?

Nonetheless, speeches don't have to be always grammatically accurate since it's a speech. We often commit mistakes in grammar as we speak, even in virtual conversations like this. I just pointed it out for some parts like this but not a speech or a dialogue.

Lastly for this area, take a look at this:

She smiled back at me and patted me on the arm.

You can improve the sentence like this: She smiled back and patted my arm.

That brings me to some advice before I proceed to the next criterion.

Learn more about different parts of speech and how to use them, if you are in the business of improving your English. There will be a lot to take in, but it won't be frightful if you're determined to construct better English sentences. Also, don't forget to recheck the entire thing and look for errors before and after you publish from time to time, so editing work will be less later on.

Character Building: 3.5.5

Well, the good thing about the story in this area is that, each character is distinct from another, and you were able to show that despite your flaws in English grammar. My only problem is that, the characters thoughts seemed jumbled, and they switch moods so frequently that I struggle to follow and sympathize with them at times, especially the main characters.

One moment, they were complaining about their shortcomings and the people around, afterward they would contradict themselves about their opinion toward the people around them, then later they were being rude and not being sorry about it.

I understand the drama of people at Scarlet and Pathum's age, but try to learn to do a better transition between those moments, and show that they are at least trying to change or improve themselves bit by bit. The first few chapters kept showing those things I'm talking about, but I believe it could've been better if you lessened those and used the other space to move the story forward instead.

Writing style - 3/5

I've already talked about the grammar and punctuation, and I think it contributes a lot to your writing style. The confusing sentence constructions is related to this, as well as the other problem I'll be discussing later on.

"It's nothing," I said, but they accepted and instead they responded by shaking their heads and frowning.

This is just one of the passages where I got confused and until now, I admit that I still don't understand the possible meaning of this very well. There might be some typographical errors that caused it, or maybe not. Either way, I'm hoping that it'll be improved in the future.

Now let's take a look on this passage:

I felt the taste of my tears but her embrace took the taste away. We remained there for a moment before mom spoke up.

There were some filler words there, the word (felt) to be exact, which could be removed to make it better and lessen your word count. However, when you wrote the sister's hug took the taste away, I got confused again because I'm not sure what does that sentence supposed to mean. I'm not even sure how can I make a revised version to at least show you how can you fix it.

Furthermore, watch out for some redundant sentences in your manuscript just like the one right here.

"Thank you so much for the kind words," I thanked her.

You don't have to put the tag after the dialogue unless it's something else other than (thank) because the thought is already in the dialogue. On the flip side, you can also simply state what you put on the dialogue tag (I thanked her.) and not write the dialogue.

There are some other form of this outside the dialogue context, and you can try figuring that out yourself.

Plot Originality: 4/5

I don't read stories with the same plot so often, and I really liked how the story goes so faar. Though it's not entirely unique, I like the idea of this story tackling a particular issue about social media, and the possible dangers that come with it. It can help giving awareness to people, especially now in this digital era.

I also commend this story for having subplots to spice it up and to not focus only on Scarlet and Pathum's virtual love story. I just hope that there could be improvements in their characters later on as the story progresses. Actually, it's better if they start improving together with the story.

Reader Engagement: 3/5

As I said earlier, I like how the story goes so far. The only problems that distract me away from the story are the slow character development, the sentence flow, lack of descriptions, the dialogues and the pacing. I'll talk about dialogues and descriptions in just a moment.

Total: 25/35

Comments:

Well, I just have some little advice if you don't mind.

Pleas put disclaimers about possibly triggering contents like mentions of self harm, suicidal attempts, any form of sexual harassment, or other related and similar ones.

Study about cultural differences, and other technical terms, especially if you are writing about: people who live in different cultural settings, psychological terms like OCD and other mental disorders, and justice system or even the people related to those. Before you put anything like those in your story, it would be nice if you do some research about it and take note of the things you should know, so the things you will write are as accurate as possible and will not mislead other people who are reading your story. Sometimes, worse if someone will get offended and start an argument with you and the other readers, so be careful.

On a related note, I think you have to fix those parts where the characters will suddenly talk about spirituality because people today may have varying opinions about it, and it's not good if it will start unnecessary arguments between your readers. Maybe put some disclaimers about it too, or if you can think of something else, why not? As long as it will be something with less potential to offend anyone, do it.

You can also use a technique where you can build questions to your chapters, but also give answers to the previous questions you left in the previous chapters. Don't give tons of questions all at once before giving the answers one by one.

Lastly, once you have a better grasp on your English grammar, try to spice up your story by using different sentence structure like simple, compound, complex, and compound complex. This will help in keeping the narration alive.

Focus Points:

Descriptions: This story lacks in descriptions to establish the scene enough. The simple ambience, the expressions, the actions, and how they all affect one another. Yes, there are some parts you give descriptions of how they feel and what they see, but you only do it sparingly, and you even put descriptions that didn't have anything to do with the scene sometimes .

For instance, when Scarlet and Pathum talked about the problem with Victor, and they part ways, you didn't give time to describe the mood and what was happening in Pathum's head. Instead, you proceeded talking about Biology, which has nothing to do with the problem at hand.

Yeah, it's said that Pathum chose to focus on his studies while Scarlet was away, but there should be a transition between the problem they were going through and Biology. Those two were different subjects, and they were concerned with different aspects, so there should be something to connect the two in the gaps.

There were also times when either Scarlet or Pathum went outside the house, and you described what they saw, but those descriptions didn't contribute anything to the scene at all. What does the flowers have to do with what's going on at that moment, especially if they would just soon entered back to the house or the topic in their virtual conversation was about something not related to what they saw.? Perhaps, if it was said how all of it affected the mood at that moment, the given descriptions could be relevant.

Dialogues: The problem with dialogues is the opposite with descriptions. This story has A LOT of dialogues, and I considered the virtual conversations as dialogues, so it really added up.

Oops! Sorry for the redundancies.:)

Anyway, I think one of the possible solutions to this is to lessen the dialogues by turning some of them into narration with enough descriptions that set the proper mood and tone for the scene. Tell what they were talking about, then show or describe what they feel about it, how they talk about it, why does it matter to them and to the story, and how did they react toward it. Remember that dialogues should also serve purposes to the plot, characterization, foreshadowing, and other information that matters to the story.

Another thing that I'd like to bring up to this point is the character's voice. You see, until now I'm still thinking about Pathum using the word (besty) and other words that Scarlet uses while talking to him.

First, they were different, separate characters, so they should have different speech patterns.

Second, boys talk differently from girls. Adults talk differently from the young. This is not to discriminate between the two, but show that they have differences, and those differences set each as a unique contributor for equality.

Third, they were from different parts of the world and different culture, so it's just reasonable that they have different vocabularies.

These don't only apply to the main characters but for every character of a story. Each should be distinguished through their voices as well, especially in the case of Scarlet and Pathum since the story was written in first person point of view.

Pacing: I think I've already mentioned a part of this in the previous points, so I don't have to elaborate it further. Again, the story and the characters should be developed all together. Also, move the plot forward in every chapter,, not just a scene.

I actually commend you because the flow of the story continues in every chapter, even though there are two separate point of views. I've known some stories that were even written in third person but still slows down the pace when the perspective changes because the author wants to show the different perspectives for one particular scene, but it's neither necessary nor helpful.

Nevertheless, I believe this story should be better if you learn to structure chapters properly. Each one should have a beginning, middle and end. Those composed of few different scenes. Sometimes there could be just one or two, but the point is, they have their own beginning, middle and end.

With that said, I'd like to also add that the cliffhangers weren't utilized effectively, but that'll change.

I also noticed that you put some chapters with A, B, and C. Well, my advice is, you don't have to keep doing this because you can write your chapters as lengthy as it would take for it to be finished. Each chapter doesn't have to be of same lengths, at the same time, it is not necessary for you to keep alternating Scarlet and Pathum's point of views. The only thing you should keep in mind in this case is that, make sure that they are occupying at least almost equal number of pages throughout the story. It doesn't to be exactly equal, but at least as close as possible.

Last note: I hope this review helps, and thank you for choosing me to be your reviewer. You can still ask for clarifications, or even share your opinion and suggestion about my reviews through the comments or private messages. I will truly appreciate it.

Also, be patient in learning things you have to learn, and do not stop. Keep writing, my friend.