4 - Obeah Gal

133 7 17
                                    

Author:kemorgan65

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Author:
kemorgan65

Genre:
General Fiction

Date of review:
October 13th to 18th, 2017
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Title

Obeah Gal? What the hell is an Obeah Gal? What language is that?

These were the first thoughts to pop in my head facing your title. The sub-title gives a hint on the origin of these cryptic words, but none on what I'm about to read. This could lead potential readers to move along without even going further.

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Cover

Simple. Dark. Beautiful hands in what seems to be a imploring, begging gesture... I like it, but I'm no further along than I was with the title.

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Blurb

I don't think the [A novella] mention is really necessary. Does it matter how long your story is in the end? At the very least, it's not well placed, cramped as it is with the blurb itself. If you want to keep it, maybe move it at the end of the blurb.

The repetition of "A Jamaican story" isn't necessary either, as it's already the title of your story. By the way, I have no idea what this means. How Jamaican stories are different of stories from other part of the world? If it's just a way to never locate your action inside the actual story, that's a big problem in my opinion.

To continue with format, I'm not sure capitals are adding anything. It seems you wanted to use a graphic highlight of your first sentence, like some do at the beginning of a chapter (I personally use bold). The thing is that your blurb isn't a chapter. It's too short to need such cosmetic effect. Not that it really matters all in all, but note that capitals are harder to read than lowercase, so it may serve your blurb badly instead of grabbing readers' attention.

Let's talk content. I think you have something there, but that it could be improved. First, after reading your blurb, I still don't know what Obeah means. What you're describing is enough for me to know it's about witchcraft, but I'd personally like to know more. Especially with the rumor sentence: you try to be mysterious here, but as I don't know for sure what's "Obeah", it doesn't work.

The end of first sentence is passive, something you should avoid when possible. Here "there was" could easily be replaced with "they didn't have" to keep the active form. Furthermore, shorter sentences would grab readers' attention better and this first sentence could be cut in two easily.

The "and" repetition in the next sentence is bugging me. One rule I follow is that two "and" in a single sentence is one too many, unless you use three or more for intended stylistic impact. That said, you really should repeat "or" instead of "and" here. As there is no oddity, you can't really use "and" as it implies that they would look for all the oddity at once, as a obeah package, when you seem to imply they would only need one to back their accusation up. I would also keep the list to three items. Firstly because three is a magical number that serves rhythm very well, but also because you already talk about bones AND skeleton, the later including the former. Finally, I would specify the kind of bottles that would point her as obeah, because I do have many bottles in my own shed of a home and never been called anything else than a drunkard.

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