Intro:
The Healing Bond was written by miiruex_. It follows several characters like Radhika and Aditya, who are doing their best to pursue their dreams in a new environment. The story takes place during their college years, meaning that not only do they have to study for their future, but they also have to discover who they are as people.
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Detailed Feedback
What Worked:
I would like to start with the small things then make my way to the bigger things, so to start, I want to say I like the presentation of your story. The title features two emotional buzzwords (Healing + Bond) and has only one weasel word (the), which is good. It's very readable and not confusing in any way with a positive word like healing, and it's short enough to appear on Google in an organized way, making for a decent SEO score. That's more of the technical stuff that helps with clicks/reads, but overall, I like the title. I also like the cover. It's cute and gives off the same vibes the core story content does, which is good to make it match. The image for the cover is cute and soft, and the font of the title is good too. Overall, good presentation.
I'm very biased since I myself am a college student, but I think you had a good match between character personalities and the setting of the story being in university. Let me first talk about the setting, then I'll delve into why I think the characters match it.
College life is a fascinating topic since many people self-destruct or make huge changes during this period. I became a professional writer in my first year of college, which was a huge life change for me. At the same time, I've never self-destructed so much before. College was, and still is since I'm not out just yet, a huge challenge that can make or break who you are. I understand my personal experience creates bias, but I think you do a good job acknowledging the hardships that come with college along with many of the emotions that a student can face, like the anxiousness and waiting to see if this life is going to break you. Those are my thoughts on the setting, so let's move into how the characters match that.
The characters match the setting due to their personalities and how they react to certain situations. There is a variety of emotions on display throughout the book, but one I want to highlight is small yet impactful: the beginning of chapter five. In the beginning of chapter five, Aditya expresses his sadness over not being able to experience sports as much in high school. One of the common emotions college students get is a longing to return to their younger, high school self. They miss the stupid drama, the pep rallies, the football games, the crappy school lunches, etc. So even though that's a small detail, I think it's an important one. Small details matter, and I'm glad you took the time to give us some, especially with the main characters.
In general, the characters all act like college kids experiencing new life events for the first time. Some of them even act like some old roommates I had, making for a more realistic take on the college genre. A lot of authors just do "party party party" without realizing how many students don't like parties, don't go to them, or only go cause they were in a mood or something similar. So having a more grounded take and seeing more sides to college outside of the whole party thing was nice. For example, us being able to see sports in the novel. The kids talk about basketball and introduce their roommates to one another. It feels mundane, but that's a good thing since too many people think college can't be mundane when it is. Sorry to disappoint anyone who thought college was just partying, but nope, it's actually pretty boring most of the time.
Similarly, there were strong themes present throughout the story, particularly with familial issues and how parents can impact the kind of person you are/the route you take in life. Kids being limited by their parents is, unfortunately, a common occurrence, especially in college where the parents practically choose their kid's field of study for them, making them miserable most of the time. It's already hard enough to be in uni, let alone studying something you never wanted to study. Those kinds of themes need to be talked about more, and I'm happy to see you decided to tackle them and show a large contrast between how the parents act for one character versus how they act for another. For sake of not spoiling it for new readers, I won't give names, so I encourage anyone reading this who isn't the author to go check out this book and find out for yourself!
While on the topic, I think the personalities of the characters are clear. While I do have suggestions for showing these personality traits instead of telling them, I still think the personalities are clear through their dialogue, even if there could be more moments of showing instead of telling, but I'll get into that later.
Overall, the story has a strong premise/ideas that will hook any reader in, especially those in the same age range of the characters. I enjoyed my experience with the book, and I think you do a good job with things like setting the scene and giving us the smaller details.
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What Didn't Work:
Be careful with telling over showing. All of the prologue is telling over showing, and I'd argue it's more character info and not a prologue. Chapter 1 starts the same way by repeating information already given to us in the prologue and telling us character info. Of course you can use telling, I would just recommend being careful about how much you're doing it. By giving us big character info right at the start, you're taking away intrigue/engagement by allowing no room for the audience to fill in the gaps/draw their own conclusions.
While on the topic, I would suggest using less adverbs since they're also telling over showing and you use many of them. I would suggest plugging the text into Google Docs or Microsoft Word and using the Find & Replace tool to search up "ly." From there, look for words ending with -ly and see if you're okay with removing a bunch of them. By cutting down on the adverbs, you're cutting down on the telling over showing.
Similar to what the other reviewers have said in the comments, you do a lot of summary over scene where you summarize what's happening and don't show us. That's another instance of telling over showing. For example, the mall scene in chapter 1, or the dance scene in chapter 2, but I'll focus on the mall. You summarize their mall trip instead of showing us. This is a huge missed opportunity, in my opinion. During the mall scene, you can characterize these people and show us why we should like them.
For example, Radhika wants to buy clothes. What clothes? What colors does she like? What style does she wear? What did the brother and father buy for the mother? What did they buy for themselves? For worldbuilding, why don't you give the mall a name? Why don't you give the cafe a name? What did they order at the cafe? You don't have to answer all those questions or even one of them, but those are questions to consider while writing.
Another commenter said you tell us the brother is mischievous but don't show it, which is true. If you tell us a character trait but don't show it, it makes it feel like the character isn't acting like they should, hence why showing over telling is so crucial and far more impactful. That mall scene could have been an opportunity to show him doing chaotic things, like hiding in clothing racks or running around like a dog without a leash. Those kinds of actions speak louder than anything you've told us. I hope that makes sense.
I would suggest not using italics for dialogue. There are many negatives and few positives to using italics, and let me explain. For one, many readers with conditions such as dyslexia are going to have a very hard time reading your dialogue, so you're limiting who can read your story. Two, italics are, in general, meant for emphasis or character thought, so readers are going to be confused about why italics are being used for entire lines of dialogue when they're not thoughts or meant to be emphasized. Three, similarly, you're going to lose an easy way to add emphasis to dialogue since now everything is italicized. Fourthly, it can be distracting and make reading speed slower. Lastly, like the previous points I've made, italics are used for emphasis, so we naturally read them in a different way, meaning people are naturally reading your dialogue differently from how you intended it to be read.
For those reasons, I recommend using standard text. In my opinion, there's nothing italicizing dialogue will do to benefit the story, and I struggle to come up with even one reason italicizing dialogue would be better than keeping it standard. For me personally, I don't like italics for dialogue and wouldn't read a story with it unless it was for something like this (my review shop). I find it very hard to read and it strains my eyes/gives me headaches.
This is a small thing, but I would recommend labeling the POVs at the start of the chapters in the beginning of the story. Sometimes it got confusing who the "I" was, which made the beginnings of some chapters hard to follow. Like in chapter 5 (excluding the prologue), you label Radhika's POV but not the previous one. You start labeling them later on in the story, so that's good, but I would suggest going back in the earlier chapters and editing it so all the POVs are labeled, just to keep it consistent. It can be confusing to read half the story where there are few, if any, POV labels, then the second half where every POV is labeled. That's why I recommend consistency there.
Similarly, I would recommend not doing as many POV changes. For example, chapter 11 has a 12 minute read time and 6 POV changes. That's half the read time, so you're changing POVs about every two minutes. In my opinion, that's far too many changes in one chapter, especially so quickly. It doesn't give the readers time to process one character's POV before we're suddenly in someone else's. I would recommend using as few POV changes as possible in a chapter. Too many POV changes can get unnecessarily confusing and take away meaning/emotion from the previous POV.
Lastly, I would suggest being careful with your language. When I read the prologue, I was worried this story was going to be purple prose because the prologue is. It was very flowery and prioritized style over story. The rest of the book is not nearly as flowery as the prologue, so it isn't purple prose, though there were moments it felt a little much, mostly in dialogue. Keep in mind most people don't speak elegantly or over-the-top with language, so if all your characters are saying things like "Even Rohan will feel the absence of his sister, the one he teasingly annoys," it feels very unrealistic. That line feels like description or exposition, not dialogue, and all the characters talk like this, making the dialogue sound robotic/emotionless at times. I would recommend reading dialogue out loud to see how it sounds, and if it sounds more like description/exposition rather than what someone would actually say, then I'd strongly recommend cutting it or rewording it to make it sound natural.
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Summary:
- Good presentation
- Nice setting that matches the characters
- Good job including smaller details about the college experience
- Strong themes
- Be careful with telling over showing
- Consider not using italics for dialogue
- Be careful with POV labels and changes
- Be careful with how language is used
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Overall:
The Healing Bond is an emotional narrative that follows college students through their life journeys. It touches on the feelings you're more likely than not going to experience while in higher education. If you're someone who enjoys reading about college or the emotions that come from school, then this is the book for you.
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Thank you for submitting your story. If you have any questions or would like another review when the shop reopens, please let me know.
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