Book: Ve Ishqa
Author: meerawrites
Reviewer: FrostedForestFairy
Chapters read: 8 (all the published ones)

Title:
The title is good! It gives the readers a clear idea about the genre of the story. And the phrasing also makes it feel almost sad/a bit like pining. So I'd say you perfectly managed to capture the tone of the story as it's a forbidden romance.

Cover:
The very first thing I noticed is that you used a picture of the Taj Mahal. That feels very misleading since the story is set in Pakistan, not India. And on top of that, it's just a random picture. It doesn’t give us a hint to what the story is about.

It's pretty eye-catching though. The picture itself is pretty and the title's font looks good. I also liked the contrast between the light font and the dark cover. So yeah, it's not bad but there's definitely room for improvement.

Blurb:
The blurb is very poetic! But it's missing any sort of intrigue. You don’t introduce the characters and you don’t set any intrigue for the readers to be interested in.

So my suggestion for the blurb is to introduce the two main characters and give a short description of their lives and personalities. And add some intrigue. What barriers will they face while trying to find love? Give some reasons why the readers should root for them and also introduce the conflict so the readers get interested. And maybe add rhetoric questions (not necessary, it's just a common tactic used to add intrigue).

I also have some grammatical criticism for the blurb.

“They're both the sun and the moon that are meant to fall in love, but can't be together, but sometimes it’s necessary for the eclipse to happen .” the space between ‘happen’ and the period/full stop isn’t necessary. And you used ‘but’ twice which feels a bit awkward to read. Try splitting up the sentence or something too, it's really long. The ‘both’ at the start doesn’t need to be there either. It makes the sentence grammatically incorrect. Maybe something like ‘they're the sun and moon but can't be together. However, sometimes it's necessary for the eclipse to happen.’

And lastly, the line ‘join me on this rollercoaster of emotion pain,love and acception.’ there's going to be a comma between ‘emotion’ and ‘pain’. There will be a space between the comma and ‘love’. And ‘acception’ isn’t a word, it's ‘acceptance’. I'd also suggest adding this line to the paragraph before it. It doesn’t have to be separate from the previous paragraph.

I really love the phrase ‘sometimes it's necessary for the eclipse to happen’!

Grammar and writing style:
Your grammar is a bit off. I'm not able to give any specific examples but you should definitely proofread the story. There's often some spacing error, you seem to sometimes forget to add commas and periods/full stops, and the sentence is sometimes grammatically wrong. Below I've pointed out two things that stood out to me.

“The first incounter” (it'll be ‘the first encounter’)

In chapters tum nahi samjhogi and an angel, you bolded the dialogue for some reason. It feels unnecessary and possibly a mistake? You could just use a normal font.

As for your writing style. It's a pretty simplistic, fast paced style (I'll elaborate that below). It's good but there's something I wanted to comment on. You don’t describe the setting at all. It makes it a bit hard for the readers to visualise the scenes. Especially readers from different cultures who may not be familiar with Lahori culture. You also don’t describe any people and that can make it hard to imagine what the characters look like. So that's definitely something I'd suggest you to do, describe the places and people. Another thing you do is add photos in the middle of chapters. Which is fine to do! But when you just post a picture of a blue eye rather than describing it, it just feels like lazy writing. You can use so many different sorts of words to describe Fakhir's eyes rather than just giving a picture. It would also create more emotion in the readers’ mind if they hear Umeed describe it.

The same with the picture of Umeed and Qayanat in the market, instead try describing them.

In the chapter an angel, you ended the chapter with ‘and saw.’ which is an incorrect sentence. Perhaps you were trying to do something like ‘and saw…’ with the ellipsis (three dots) to show a half sentence. You could do that. But my personal suggestion would be to end in a full sentence. Like ‘and saw her cousin’. It gives us more intrigue since we now have a new character introduced who we can learn about in the next chapter.

And lastly, you tend to switch between points of view. Specifically between first person pov and third person pov (which you call ‘author's pov’). I've said this before and this can be a super intricate technique that could be used to veer your story in the direction you want. But the way you’re doing it, it just feels incoherent? You seem like a beginner writer and I'd suggest sticking to a specific pov in your story to give a more well-rounded impression. So either only write in first or third person. Not both.

Plot and pacing:
The plot is pretty interesting! It's a classic forbidden romance plot with the obstacle being the family. I'm curious to see how the plot will develope, so far it's good. But we as readers hardly get any information. For example, in the first chapter, where was Umeed? How did Fakhir find her? It felt like they randomly bumped into each other and it didn’t feel very complete. And maybe elaborate on Umeed's cousin and her parents to give the readers a better look into her life rather than just telling us. The pacing is very random. Things randomly happen one after another without much coherence. So try to transition each scene into the next so that it feels natural. And the same with the pacing, it's fine to have a fast pace story but yours is too fast. At times it's better to slow down and give some information to the readers in between the actions the characters perform. So I suppose what I'm saying is having more internal monologue from the characters would add a lot more depth to the story.

Another thing related to the pacing would be to try to make each scene more detailed and longer. At the moment they feel very short.

Characterisation:
The concepts of the characters are interesting. It's an ‘opposites attract’ type of romance. But Umeed and Fakhir don’t feel like opposites. They almost feel like the exact same person. The character voices aren’t exactly distinct, they feel the same. And character voice is a big part of writing a story. To make the characters feel like different people you need to give them different character voices. Maybe Fakhir will use certain words Umeed won’t and vice versa. And they'll definitely perceive the world very differently. Maybe as an engineer Fakhir will see things more logically or in a more systematic way. And maybe Umeed will see it more spontaneously and artistically. Stuff like that.

And the ‘characters’ chapter says that Umeed doesn’t believe in love, so to me it doesn’t make sense for her to be instantly attracted to Fakhir, to be honest. So maybe give her a bit more time before showing her crush on Fakhir. Develope the characters slowly. They feel a bit flat to be honest. Adding a bit more depth to all characters would really bring out the best in your story.

The blurb also said ‘she's the poetry, he's the poet’ so honestly I'd love to see that (maybe it's in later chapters).

Conclusion:
Overall, the story is good! I had fun reading it (especially since it's hard to find south asian stories often). Just try to improve on the things I pointed out and I think it'd make the story much better. The places where you did elaborate on the description was fun to read. Your metaphors are really good!

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