The Review Court

You Must Remember This || Reviewer: monique0912345

The little introductions of the people were good, but I was unsure who the main character is and whose headspace we were meant to be in. I thought we would be in the teachers (John's) headspace/view but we weren't.

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Dialogue:
I felt your dialogue was great. You know about dialogue vs action tags and punctuated your dialogues according to those which was correct, and I am so so happy you got the punctuation right. The dialogues felt natural, and I quite liked them.

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Description:
Well, well, well, what can I say here? You had the description alright. A lot of it in fact. It took me a while to get past the first paragraph because it was just a big wall of text. On desktop it took up my whole screen so I cannot imagine how overwhelmed mobile/app users might find it. You had about six or seven big paragraphs of descriptions, but the issue is there was no character voice. It was just information on information that a reader will not remember by the time they reach the end of your first chapter.

What would have helped was if you had these descriptions weaved into the narrative rather then thrown at us. I admit that I had to read over the first two paragraphs once I got to the end of them cause it just wouldn't sink in.

I'm going to be very honest here and say I felt like I was reading a school textbook for history or something and not a novel throughout the first maybe seven paragraphs. It was just emotionless, characterless, blunt and boring for me. It did not hook me in at all. I would suggest adding more character voice.

I'll give you a random example.

1. Simple/characterless: The building stood tall, shadowing all its people.
2. With character voice: The building towered over her small frame creating a large shadow which made it hard for her to see in front of her.
See how much better the sentence sounds with a character voice? You will keep your readers interested and it will grip their attention more then just textbook like descriptions.

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Sentence structure/Spelling:
Your spelling was on point. I saw no spelling mistakes throughout, so that is always great to see. I really liked your use of words as well. Your sentences were well written and the way you play with words really worked. That said, I do want to mention any areas of improvement.

In the second paragraph you have a repetition of 'here' in two sentences after each other. These are the sentences I am referring to. I will put 'here' in brackets:

"Sometimes the dance team would practice [here], and the coach would bark orders from above. A few students chained their bikes to the fence [here], and bolder ones abandoned any sort of precaution and trusted in the universe to do them a favor and not allow anything untoward to happen."

I would suggest getting rid of the second 'here' to allow for better flow.

When we finally got a dialogue, I noticed you had actions that weren't the teachers in the same paragraph. Allow me to explain. The paragraph I am referencing is where you have the dialogue "Come on, keep moving-" etc. You go on to say "When the car reached the climax" which could be in a new paragraph since you are then talking about students and parents I believe and not the teachers action.

I would like to now reference the paragraph that starts with 'Like loose drops of water from a showerhead'. In the sentence 'They looked then at the crowd of many outfits, colors, shapes, sizes and expressions with awe' I feel like the 'then' disrupts the flow and isn't necessary as without it the sentence would flow better and be easier to read.

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Overall:
Overall, I thought this was a good first chapter. Your novel has a lot of potential if the issues I mentioned above were fixed. I truly want to help you. I noticed a few times you wrote numbers as they were as opposed to spelling them out. Numbers under 100 should be spelt out so 60 minutes should be sixty minutes and 30 minutes should be thirty minutes. I felt your transitions for scenes and such were great and felt natural.

I would strongly suggest you break up the larger paragraphs into smaller ones (maybe into two paragraphs) so you will not lose readers due to them being so large.

I would also strongly suggest ending your first chapter with a cliffhanger or a hook to entice a reader into wanting to read on because currently I saw no hook that would make me want to read on

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Reviewed by: monique0912345