Sapphire's Review Store 4.0

Review by Faye: An Atheist's Afterlife

Title: An Atheist's Afterlife

Author: scrabblepost

Reviewer: Fayesther

Cover and Title: (4/5)

The picture used within the cover is absolutely perfect to illustrate this story. The font choice works well too. I think it would look more pleasing to the eye if the sun (or heavenly bright light?) Was more central and the font was flush to the black background.

The title is nicely chosen and it was really cool that the title is written as the very last sentence in the story.

Nit-pick – "Atheists" in the title needs an apostrophe because the "Afterlife" belongs to the atheist in this phrase.

Blurb (4/5)

A good use of open questions to introduce the book's concept. These are deep questions that many like to explore.

I am not a fan of the last sentence, however, I think it will benefit your blurb if you keep it to the questions and maybe tie it up with a statement that fits the theme of the story. "Read to find out." Either comes across as pushy or cheesy.

The length of your blurb is ideal. I am a sucker for a short and snappy blurb!

Grammar (3.5/5)

A majority of your writing is spot on grammar wise. However, I did find some typos here and there that I commented on (I hope you don't mind that I did).

I also noticed some recurring errors within how your speech was punctuated.

When closing dialogue speech marks always come after the punctuation used at the end of what is said.

Example from your book: "Hi", I say she turns around and looks at me.

Edited: "Hi," I say, she turns and looks at me.

This sentence also needed a comma after "say" because there is always a natural pause before action after a speech tag ("I say", "she asks" etc.)

I also noticed another error within speech punctuation within chapter three, but I believe this was just a typo because you didn't repeat this mistake at any other part of the book.

Also in chapter three, there are sections of dialogue that have not got speech marks. This entire chapter is a conversation between the main character and a Muslim woman, therefore, it's important to keep the speech punctuation consistent.

Another little nit-pick is that chapter six's title has a grammar error "An Atheists" should say "An Atheist".

Like I said earlier in this section, the majority of your writing was really well written grammatically. There were just a few slip ups here and there that won't take long to fix in an edit.

Writing style (4/5)

Your writing style is enjoyable and easy to follow. You describe your settings incredibly well, adding details in subtly that brought the main character's surroundings to life.

Your writing style was ideal for communicating the different ideas present within your story. The use of your main character asking leading and open questions was a good choice to get straight into the philosophical aspects of your book.

However, at times the book's voice did come across a bit clinical. Almost like a textbook. This was only the case in some sections, not all the way through the book. I found how you expressed the polytheist and atheist heaven really interesting.

The way you structured your story worked so well. I like that each chapter was written about a different heaven. Your story was paced very nicely and stuck rigidly to the point, which worked perfectly for what you were exploring within this thought experiment journey.

Characterisation (3/5)

Your characterisation worked well for this story on the surface. However, I found that the characters within this story were not explored very deeply. I found out very little about the main character's backstory, personality traits and anything that made them an individual. The same could be said about the people the main character encounters too. However, I understand your story is written with a specific purpose in mind. It's not a character based story, but a chance to communicate philosophical ideas.

As a fan of characterisation, I would have liked to have some more clues within your writing about what made the people involved tick. Through adding in personal gestures that they may have – such as hand movements, ticks, how they hold themselves etc. You can communicate a lot about a person when adding these small details in.

That being said, you did show some variety within your characters with dialogue and how they expressed themselves through speech. The way that "God" spoke in his/her chapters was unique and you managed to capture an otherworldly quality to the character. I liked how he/she answered questions with more questions that added to the mystery and omniscient tendencies of that powerful being.

Plot (4/5)

This story flowed very nicely from one concept to another. Each chapter explored different concepts in an interesting way and you set up each scene vividly within your writing.

Within each chapter the main character meets very interesting people with very different perspectives. It was intriguing to see how each of these people reacted to the main character of the story.

I learned various things about other religions and the view of Christian heaven through an atheists eyes was interesting. However, being a Christian myself, I did find the theology behind this chapter problematic. For instance, people turning into angels is not a Biblical concept and not a true Christian belief. I would've also liked Jesus to have been mentioned within the Christian chapter – for his life, death and resurrection is the corner stone of the Christian religion not the ten commandments or works on Earth. That being said, the Christian heaven's entrance criteria was well thought through for this story – for it would seem that difficult to get into heaven without Jesus in the picture.

I hope you understand why I reflected mostly on the Christianity chapter, it is just that I do not know enough about Hinduism or Islam to comment about their accuracy.

The "polytheist" and "atheist" chapters also included fascinating ideas. However, I did find it confusing that the atheists talked about seeing God. That seemed like a bit of a contradiction.

I did, however, like the idea that the "God" the main character ended up talking to looked and sounded like him/herself. This was subtly added and helped make sense of the "contradictions" within the atheist chapter.

Overall

This story was well thought through and portrayed within a simple and well executed structure. You used open ended questions really well throughout, which gave you a good platform to explore a number of philosophical ideas. I appreciate the disclaimer you wrote before you delved into the story, however, I would like to say that misrepresenting another person's religion, whether it is your intention to or not, can make your work read as offensive. I would suggest researching further within the religions that you want to portray, so to ensure that you're not using misinformation.

The way you described the world that the main character experienced was really immersive, I could vividly see what was happening in my mind's eye. I really liked how your story came round in a full circle. You had a clear idea for what you wanted to express and you executed it well.

Thank you for asking me to review your story. I hope you found my feedback helpful.