Title: OYINADE

Author: the_learningwriter

Genre/s: Teen Fiction, Mystery, Romance

Number of Chapters: 32

Mature?: No

POV: First person

Status: Ongoing

OYINADE

[in the author's own words]

Meet Oyinade Adebayo;

A dyslexic student who discovers a new ability to sprint without fainting. After this discovery, she decides to join the athletics team in her school and strives diligently to achieve her overall goal of becoming an Olympics champion and medalist. She practices day and night and tries to avoid all forms of distractions.

But does she succeed?

How else is a teenager supposed to focus on academics alone despite raging hormones and hormonal imbalances?

How else is this particular teenager supposed to survive despite unfavourable financial conditions?

How is she to spend time on her passion for sprinting, get good grades, sustain friendships, meet the noble career standard required by her Nigerian parents and ultimately, create a stable relationship with God?

What's worse?

The school authorities suddenly raise the bar of academic performances of all athletes. Oyinade is barred from the school team unless her grades improve. It's left for her to find out the true cause of her consistent failure.

Is it really because of her dyslexia?

Does she even know she's dyslexic?

As if that was not enough, something tragic, in the most fatal way possible, happens just before the Olympics.

Will Oyinade pull through?

Will she be able to sprint as she used to?

How will she navigate increasing her grades, practising for the competitions and maintaining relationships with friends and family?

Will she achieve her goal of being an Olympics champion?

In a relatively short journey through the penultimate year in high school and final year, how will this young girl, her friends and archenemies manage to form unexpected bonds, sever toxic relationships, fix broken images, create long-lasting friendships and love themselves and each other?

Find out in this intriguing and motivating story.

- ♡ -

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 first 5 chapters only.]

AND

TITLE: This story's title is short (readable on every device) and simple - which is a good thing. The title seems like just the main character's name at the first glance but when I googled it, I realized the name and title actually hints about your plot as well (since Oyinade means "pioneering spirit"). Though the title is unique for the above reasons, I'm not really sure if it's something that can give your story curiosity clicks. In such a case, a combination of the cover + title + blurb becomes crucial in determining whether potential readers would check this story out and read it ahead.

COVER: The image and the colour scheme of the cover is beautiful and somewhat rare. The title of your story is clearly visible however, the subtitle (I can't see the text below the title so I'm guessing it's that) and the author's name / username are not visible at all. I suggest making them more prominent.

♡♡♡♡.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. At first glance, this blurb looks a little too long to me personally. I found certain information that might not have been necessary in just the synopsis and many lines could either be combined to make this compact or eliminated altogether. However, I have to point out that the current blurb has no errors and functions well as such but somehow, your hook and conflict's impact kind of dies down with all the extra information. You can pick your most critical (and intriguing) plot points and stick just to them here instead of possibly summarizing the whole major plot in the blurb. This is my personal opinion and not all readers may feel the same way.

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.

♡♡♡.5

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. Oyinade's struggle is clearly visible in this story especially when all external factors seem to turn against her. Her relationships with different people in the story so far really help charting out her character arc but owing to the slow pace of the story, I don't think I can form an opinion on her as of yet [more on this covered below].

-----

AND

Judging from the 5 chapters I have read...

PACE & WRITING - At times, I felt like the story moved a bit too slow. I get that this story is majorly centered around personal struggles but through most of the scenes, it just felt like we were watching the scenes unfold and pass by. In my opinion, this was majorly because of the lack of emotional descriptions. It is somewhat acceptable to not delve into the physical descriptions (surroundings, appearances etc.) but I felt like a little more emotionally descriptive writing could very easily uplift this story's narration as well as the reading experience. There was a lot of tell (eg. it was autumn season right now) instead of show (eg. the leaves crunched beneath her feet) which might make the reading slightly mechanical. Don't get me wrong, your characters are very powerful and so is your plot - judging from the blurb - and the narration has a lot of potential to make this story much more connecting and relatable (which is why I'm trying to nitpick right now).

PLOT & HOOK - Due to the slow pace of the story (which might not necessarily be a negative thing unless emotions are not vividly shown / expressed in the story), I haven't been able to reach the core of the plot yet (in the first 5 chapters; by which any potential reader would decide whether or not they wish to continue reading this story) but the gradual way her struggles and relationships with her friends and family are introduced is sweet and interesting. Makes me wonder about their reactions once Oyinade's conflicts come into the picture ahead.

GRAMMAR & WRITING - I am not here to edit and pinpoint small mistakes (a simple run though MS Word or Grammarly 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 few grammar / punctuation errors but as said above, all you need is a quick run through MS Word or similar softwares to solve them. The punctuations around the dialogue tags (ending with a comma v/s a full-stop and related capitalizations in the next word) throughout the story need to be worked on. Certain word choices could have been better but nothing to worry about here, as this will definitely improve with more practice.

READIBILITY & AESTHETICS - The paragraphs are sized properly - neither too small, nor too big and the overall aesthetic of the story on the screen is perfectly adequate. However, the spacing is not consistent in the story (some lines have a single spacing while some have double) and that slightly distracts from reading. I haven't come across any POV shifts so far but if the entire story is from Oyinade's POV, it doesn't need to be mentioned before every chapter. And if the POV shifts sometime later in the story, I suggest adding this POV alert in bold to break it out from the rest of the text.

♡♡♡.5

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