Dreamland Review Archive

Redemption (CW)

Blurb

You get about three more achievements, and the word count for those achievements will probably be the same as your blurb.

And no, that is not a compliment U^.^ 

There is nothing horribly wrong with your blurb, but it leaves me very much left wanting, and not in the good way. 

No, you do not want to build your character or your world in the summary. However, we need to get enough of a taste of it to know whether we want to dive into the story. Right now, it's a very generic summary of a dystopian type world.

Give us some idea of what should make us care about Rose, give us some idea of what makes your dystopian world different from all the others.  Hunger Games, kids all had to kill each other.  Divergent, people were defined by traits and put into factions.  It doesn't have to give away a ton, build the world, reveal the entire plot, anything, but we do need to have some idea of why in the world we should pick up this book.

Experience/Plot

In this section, we will delve into my thoughts and experience as the plot progressed.

---PROLOGUE

Just seeing the start of this prologue, I can already tell how it's going to go.  Little girl gets forced to hide and potentially see while her parents are brutally murdered.  

I'm honestly a bit confused why the girl is crying intensely enough to sob just to instantly calm at hide and seek.  If she jumped on that subject right away, I may understand, but she's still more focused on her mother's fear than the game.

Although I understand later plot wise why Rose needs to have the satchel, the mother giving it to her makes little sense.  Yeah, they plan on her running off and hiding.  But they seem very sure she'll have to run off by herself if they want her to hold it.  Which if she's a little girl, that satchel would just trip her up and make her more likely to get caught.  You'd think one of the parents would be in the mindset of "no matter what, I'm going to try to live so my daughter isn't alone and defenseless."

Okay, so I wasn't entirely right.  They were making their way through the streets and then she was told to run off.  

Still, I'm not overly drawn in.  These sort of starts (child sees parents be murdered by evil organization) aren't uncommon, so if you're going to use it, you really want to make it feel like its own.  You are introducing us to your plot.  I've already remarked on a generic title and a generic summary, and now we are being introduced into your story with a generic opening.  Honestly from this point, nothing has drawn me in.  I was actually happy you'd done away with the prologue at first and had remarked that I was glad.  I just see nothing added here that couldn't be gained via learning this information in the actual story, and even worse, this introduces a lot of problematic elements.

Primarily, the parents had a twisted desire when it came to their child's life.  Sure, maybe they wanted to try and hold back the killers while their daughter ran, but how did they expect her to survive?  And did they not expect the killers to try to track her down, especially if giving her something of importance to protect?

Also, I have 0 idea how she lives and isn't captured.  There are multiple full grown man.  Only one has to have a gun trained on her mother.  Unless there is magic we don't know about that happens, Rose should not live.  They would have caught her.  They could have turned their guns on her and killed her.

---CHAPTER ONE

Honestly, I'm struggling a good bit with the hook.  Sure, you have instant tension, but there's just nothing to make me feel invested to that tension.  I'm not saying you can't have starts that jump right into the action.  I don't agree with that mind set entirely, but it is difficult to pull off, and this just isn't doing it for me.  I think a lot of it has to do with the way its written, which I'll get into in the writing section because it's an issue that I notice throughout.