The Perfect Candy By  ChristineAcedon

Reviewer - mr_fahrenheit13

Cover/Title: Looks great, nice and simple, fits the tone of the story and looks like it would be right at home in a Barnes & Noble. The title is honestly genius, Candy being short for Candice and that being factored in the title is very cute.

4.5/5

Story: I had a very, very hard time immersing myself in this story. I hate to come out swinging with such a devastating line, but that ended up being the primary detractor of this story for me. Very little of this narrative is concerned with worldbuilding and contextualization, and it made the story incredibly bland and shallow. It might sound silly to complain about worldbuilding in a story set in real life, but it’s actually one of the most important things to consider when writing anything. I need to know what the world is for Candice, what’s important to her, what does she want, where she wants to go. How does she feel about her friends, her family, the community surrounding her? I spent the entire story (up to the point I read, I plan on continuing because I wholeheartedly hope it will improve over time) not knowing any of these things. The best way I can describe this problem is that I when I was reading a scene, I only saw the characters participating and interacting, and everything else was a gaping black void. My imagination could not fill in the blanks for this story, and I was given nothing to work with because of an incredible lack of depth. I’ll get into this more when I get to character writing, but the story itself suffered immensely from weak characters that feel two-dimensional and bland. Now that the gross stuff is out of the way, I would like to say that I found myself enjoying the story quite a bit. Despite my gripes with the poor use of time leading to moments falling flat due to lack of buildup, the story is very easy to follow and not unnecessarily complicated, which really works in its favor. I mildly enjoyed the characters interacting and watching the story unfold in a predictable, but not unenjoyable
way. However, the romance and interpersonal drama being 100% of the focus might not be a great idea, because as interested as I was in how the story would play out, I really wanted a little bit of variety in the storytelling.

All in all, there is potential in this story, but it really does suffer from the poor execution

Score - 2/5

Grammar/Punctuation: This story is very well edited and I noticed almost no mistakes. I can tell there was great attention to detail, and the only mistake was a little lack of clarity during scenes with multiple people. I’m not the brightest so this might be a personal issue, but I found myself needing to read some things a couple times to understand what was going on because the picture in my head was just a little unclear. Other than that, beautifully written story. 4.5/5

Character Building: Alright, now this is the section where I really have to tear into the story, but I want to be fair by praising it first. I did not hate the characters in this story, and did not mind at all how derivative they were. Characters that you absolutely have seen before somewhere else is not enough of a reason for me to write off a story as terrible. However, absolutely nothing separates these familiar character archetypes from the clichés of the genre. Having a “cute nerdy girl” or “bratty popular girl” character is not bad on its own, but the problem lies in the fact that they remain cardboard cutouts of those tropes for the length of the story and never come into their own with unique motivations and desires that invest me in their characters. Something I will give The Perfect Candy credit for is that it doesn’t write characters in the most insufferable way possible, which is starting out with a monologue from the main character that flat-out tells the reader everything they want and how they see the world, and I’m happy we never went that route. However, you do need to establish these things throughout the story, and effective writing will teach the audience multiple things as we read. Small character moments and ongoing establishment go a very long way in teaching us about the world and characters inhabiting it. Both the main characters and side characters felt incredibly flat and I really struggled to connect with any of them. I was really hoping this was the kind of story that would grab my attention and get me to care about these characters and get invested in the romance, but I instead found a story that took my attention for granted. I wholeheartedly hope the author takes this criticism and uses it to improve in the future, I can’t wait to see you grow because you have the potential to be an incredible writer. 2.5/5

Writing Style: Now we’re talking. The writing itself was the thing that kept me reading, it is incredibly easy to follow and effortlessly casual from an audience’s perspective. I would prefer some more descriptions and atmosphere, and for those to be used as avenues for more immersion, but I enjoyed the simple, effective storytelling present in what was there. Another thing that impressed me was the dialogue. Writing dialogue for high schoolers is incredibly difficult to pull off, it needs to be dumb enough to actually sound like it’s coming from a teenager, but not so dumb that it kills brain cells. The Perfect Candy strikes a great balance between the two, I mostly had no trouble imagining a kid saying what was written. There were a few exceptions (a few words that no teenager would be caught dead saying), but I was rarely yanked out of the story due to word choice, which has pulled me out of similar stories in the past. Wonderful job! 3.5/5

Plot Originality: I’ve pretty much said all I’d like to on this topic, but would like to reiterate that doing something that has been done before is not inherently bad. Character tropes exist because they tend to work, but what I really wanted from this story is a unique spin on familiar classics. I want to see the author’s personal take on certain archetypes, and not feel like every character is a watered down version of something I’ve already seen before. Get adventurous! Be ambitious! Make the people in your story seem real and maybe even be subversive by making characters the audience is familiar with different from their expectations. A little more thought being put into making your characters more three-dimensional will go a very long way. 2/5

Focus Points:

Depth: A tricky one to define, but climactic and important moments have so much more weight if they are built up to effectively. Make an effort to set up pins before knocking them down, if I can understand the consequences of events, I will be all the more affected by what I read

Character Development: The second word is the most important; develop your characters as the story progresses. This doesn’t just mean have them grow and change as the story goes along, but every chapter, every paragraph, every sentence should service in teaching the audience about the characters and giving them reasons to care about them. This is something you will improve on just by writing stories more and more, so don’t stop!

Overall Score:  19.5/30