Title: Compromised

Author: medicallymessedup

Genre/s: Romance, Contemporary

Number of Chapters: 38

Mature?: Yes

POV: Mixed (3rd person + 1st person; multiple)

Status: Ongoing

COMPROMISED

[in the author's own words]

•An arranged marriage romance•

❝She hasn't wished for stars,

until his smile lit up her gloomy sky.

He wasn't bizarre,

But a pair of conundrum orbs

thrilled him to chase them forever.❞

▪︎▪︎▪︎

𝗔 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝘀𝗵𝗲 𝗸𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘆𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁𝗲𝗿.

"You're such a crybaby!" He laughed making me cringe internally.

How does he know this sweet as sugar nickname of mine?

"Shut up!" I snapped back.

'𝐇𝐞'𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐢𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐡𝐞'𝐬 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐲.'

Dive into the world of Ruchi and Aryan and read what their COMPROMISED DESTINY holds for them.

- ♡ -

B O O K  R E V I E W

[Before we begin, please keep in mind that everything mentioned below is my personal opinion. My intention isn't to offend anyone; the only reason I am going into such detail is to be able to help my fellow writers out there. I do not claim to be correct; just sharing my opinion from my experience here on Wattpad. The following review is based off of the PROLOGUE + first 4 chapters only.]

TITLE: This story's title is short (readable on every device since it's a one word title) and simple - which is a good thing. But if your objective is to gain more readers or make people check out your story, a unique title is what would pull them and make them click. There are a lot of stories on Wattpad with this title currently so it can be easy for this story to somehow get lost in the crowd (in my opinion).

COVER: If I'm being totally honest, this cover is kind of basic (and the covers you've attached inside the book in a chapter are much, much better than this one in my opinion). The title, author's name and genre are very clearly communicated on it which is a good thing.

♡♡♡.5

FIRST IMPRESSION:  Your title "Compromised" gave me those arranged marriage vibes (which is validated by the first line in your blurb too). The cover didn't communicate much tbvh (I personally think a vivid colour palette would work better on a romance story's cover instead of this black and white vibe but that could be just my opinion which others may not relate to.) More on the blurb below.

♡♡♡.5

BLURB: Apart from the cover and title, the blurb plays a major role in determining whether or not someone clicks on your story to check it out. Got to admit, I personally am not a fan of very spaced out and long blurbs but this story completely changed that. I really liked how you've formatted your blurb (sadly the one I've inserted above took out all the formatting & fancy fonts). This blurb will definitely stand out among the million other arranged marriage stories on Wattpad simply because of how unique and aesthetic it looks. 

Just to nitpick, 2 lines stood out in a little odd way to me - "How does he know this sweet as sugar nickname of mine?" sounds a little off / unnatural to me personally. And there could have been a better closing / hook like than '𝐇𝐞'𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐢𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐡𝐞'𝐬 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐲.' to make readers click. Especially because the last line of any blurb usually plays the biggest role in convincing someone to check your story out.

[Edit: This reaction was written before reading the story so I could stay true to the experience of someone checking this story out for the first time. Now that I've read the first 5 chapters, she's literally his crybaby lol xD]

P.S. You don't have to change anything but if you wish to, you can always experiment with new styles of blurbs to see what kind attract readers most.

♡♡♡♡

CHARACTERS: While what makes someone click on a story is a cover / title / blurb, what makes them stay is your plot and especially your characters. Their relatability, the whole vibe they give off and how well the characterization is done plays a huge role in a story. After all, it is easy to forget a story's title or maybe even plot but some characters stay with you even after you've finished reading the story.

Our FMC - Ruchi is someone who likes hiding her pain and problems which I feel most readers will be able to relate to instantly. Her childhood and past (not adding the details because you already know them + spoilers for the ones reading this) develop her character sketch deeper and the trauma she has endured also explains why she would instantly develop a liking for Aryan (literally recreating her childhood trauma by seeking someone who ignores her like the people from her past did). This feels very consistent in my opinion (though it may not have been intentional).

[Ootp but Aakash was so whipped by her it was lowkey hilarious; in a good way of course xD. I really, really loved his Cinderella dialogue; that was way too cute out of nowhere. Totally did not see it coming *_*. Also, her family legit guilt-tripped her into the marriage meeting which is so realistic. I loved the little cultural touches like these!]

Aryan... Our MMC badly needs to pick a side. I'm annoyed at him which I believe was the point you were trying to put across anyway so good job on that! He can't have a girlfriend and pine over someone else at the same time. I am so keen on finding out how his character develops ahead in the story (that prologue got me all intrigued)!

♡♡♡♡.5

AND

[combining these 2 points to explain things more effectively]

Judging from the prologue + 5 chapters I have read...

PACE & PLOT -

I won't review / judge this story like most others on Wattpad and I'll explain why. This story played out in my head perfectly like a TV serial (especially with the multiple POV swaps in the same chapter!) instead of a book. Plus, it was about 80% dialogues with minimal descriptions so it truly felt like I was watching this play out as a serial while reading it.

In such a case, you expect there to be a lot of character development (such as details about the family, their backstories, family drama and other stuff that builds our main character's character sketch) before diving into the main plot. The pace of the plot is expected to be slow if I view it this way, the pace is perfectly fine. If I see this solely as a story / novel, the pace might feel a bit slow only at certain times. But the biggest hook that works for your story (at least in my case) was the prologue. It makes me want to find out why and how things played out ahead.

DESCRIPTIONS, WRITING & GRAMMAR -

Firstly, I really like the way your translations & glossaries simultaneously blend into the story. Makes reading so much simpler for someone who doesn't understand Hindi. One suggestion I'd give is to include the word "Translation:" before you translate a dialogue. Because you've explained other words as glossary like "Jaadu:" or "Rajma Chawal:" before explaining them, this way a non-Hindi reader will know when they're reader a dialogue that was actually spoken in the story and when they're reading a mere explanation of a word used somewhere. I personally feel it would create a better flow for them. The hindi dialogues flow very naturally & casually and I like how you've tried to maintain the same vibe in English though you had to translate it (what I mean is: the dialogues stayed the same way, casual and natural, in English and didn't get all formal or unnatural just because you translated them).

I am not here to edit and pinpoint small mistakes (a simple run though MS Word or Grammarly or even Google Docs can do that) so I'll be saying this from a reader's perspective - the kind that don't intentionally try to hunt for mistakes. Overall, I felt like were a very few grammar, spelling & punctuation errors. Some construction & tense errors (like 'marry them' instead of 'get them married', 'did not wanted me' instead of 'want' etc.) were spotted but again, most simple grammar checking software will flag them.

If there was just one thing I would suggest to change about / work on this story (if you want to change the serial vibe to a novel vibe), it would definitely be descriptions. There are a lot of back-to-back dialogues and the descriptions only happen around those conversations. If you don't like describing physical surroundings, you can always resort to the emotional descriptions aka show how people "feel" in a certain situation (and there is a lot of scope for expanding on that in this story).

The flashbacks & old dialogues that a character is recollecting could be italicized to make them stand out from rest of the text and clearly indicate that they're past memories / flashbacks (you've already started this from Chapter 3 but the chapters before that have it in normal text so it blends in with the rest of the story part which can get a bit confusing).

I like how you've included song links at the beginning of each chapter. Perfectly sets the vibe for the chapter. And your graphics are *_*

Overall, a very cute story. Had fun reading so far! Wishing you good luck for this story *_*

♡♡♡♡

GENERAL POINTS TO NOTE FOR BOOK REVIEWS

Hey there. Here is your book review. Hope this helped in any way. If there's something else you need an opinion on for this story, please feel free to drop a comment here.

- My intention with this book review was not to offend anyone (sorry if I did). I just genuinely wanted to help a fellow writer out with my insights.

- Please do not undo any payments after you have received your review.

- In case you need any more assistance, feel free to request again for the same service / another one.

Thank you so much for requesting from R3!

Hope you have a great day <3