Title: Alternatives
Author: Gold_star21
Genre: Science fiction
Rating: PG 13
# of chapters: 4 (ongoing)
# of chapters I read: 3
Summary/ Blurb:
In 2137, a new society was born and they called themselves the New Union. Their world had fallen to ashes, but they built upon the idea of division based on age. Another vision came from this idea that every five years, no more and no less, a person would be presented with two options and told to choose one of the given choices. Within the five years, people would learn to adapt alongside others who made the same decision.
Tessa, a seventeen year old girl, has already made three choices, but her decision was unlike every other person's. No one has ever been known to live the way Tessa had been living for the past seventeen years and lived to tell the tale. Until one day, her secret comes out and her life becomes endangered. And with every step she takes, Tessa knows she's being watched and fears by making one wrong move, she will become death's next victim.
Review:
Cover:
The cover is amazing—your designer managed to cleverly incorporate the most important elements of your story into a single image, without, at the same time, making it look disorganized and chaotic. I wonder whether the fortress is supposed to be the headquarters for the New Union, while both the girl looking into the sunlight and the larger, translucent one, are Tessa. This shows two different sides to the same character. We have that strong side, where she takes charge and picks the choices no one else would dare to while that weaker, more vulnerable side shows how alone she is in the face of so many conformists.
The only downfall here is that fact that you can't really see the title. I feel like it would be better to swap it with the author's name. (Plus, you have the banner taking away the attention from it).
Overall—Eye-catching.
Blurb:
When I first started reading it, I thought, "wow, another boring old dystopia novel." How many times have I read a story revolving around a dictatorship rising from the ashes of a destroyed world? Countless of times. But things got a little more interesting as I read on—I got some Matrix vibes from the storyline, especially because you kept the nature of the 'two choices' ambiguous. It raises a lot of questions. What does she have to choose between? Material goods? Relationships? I think you should add in some sort of sentence outlining this—"The choices could range from [—] to [—], nothing was set in stone." (Bad example, but I hope you get what I mean).
It happens every five years, so it must be something major—the people there are probably monitored 24/7, as to collect data for this event. It's good that I managed to deduce this simply by reading in-between the lines. You didn't have to go through the whole spiel about how people live in fear, etc. it's all there.
My earlier comment on the nature of the choices also applies to the second paragraph. With a little more detail regarding it, it can make the part where "Tessa, a seventeen-year-old girl, has already made three choices, but her decision was unlike every other person's" clearer.
I can't believe that Tessa is the only one that picked a certain pattern of 'choices' in the entire population. There must be at least a few other people that picked the same things as her, she can't possibly be the only rebel in the whole society. So I think you should reword the last sentence of the first paragraph, "Within the five years, people would [have to] learn to [survive] alongside the others, without knowing whether they shared the same decision with someone else."
There is also some repetition in some parts: "No one has ever been known to live the way Tessa had been living for the past seventeen years and lived to tell the tale." This can be easily shortened to: "No one has been known to make the same choices as Tessa and lived to tell their tale."
The final sentence shouldn't start with the conjunction 'and', and I think it's too long. "With every step she takes, Tessa knows that she's being watched. She's walking on thin ice, and even one misstep can make her fall through, and become death's next victim."
Overall—Pretty compelling.
First Impression:
The opening of the story sounded a little odd to me because I didn't understand that she was running on a thread mill until halfway through the paragraph. You should make that clear from the beginning.
Other than that everything was smooth, with only the odd typo (e.g. "She knew what came the notice." Maybe you meant, "She knew what came after the notice.") I found it ironic how in the narration it first said that the "security drones seldom approached citizens who were passed Last Time" but then, soon after, Tessa gets silently approached by one. I also found it a little too coincidental that her "time keeper" showed the wrong time after that statement. Wouldn't there be a bigger time keeper in the Healthy Livings building? I can't believe that there isn't one—clocks are everywhere.
There are a couple of things I found a little off-putting but I'd firstly like to go back on the new names you've given to everyday objects. "Time keeper", "running platform", etc. they're all clever, and it really makes you wonder why we currently call these things the way we do. I mean, who thought of the word "clock", right? 'Time keeper' makes a lot more sense, as does 'running platform' instead of thread mill. Maybe because they're slowly rediscovering language (because from what I understand, with the destruction of the world came also the destruction of English) so they have to rename everything again. In a couple of years, they should shorten things.
The main thing that I felt was off was the fact that nobody knows what her choices are, or at least, not the government. I mean, when she went into the room and got given the choices by the drone, wasn't her answer recorded? Aren't the answers of all people recorded? It doesn't make sense to me. One thing is that the common folk shouldn't know about this 'secret' of hers, which obviously sets her apart from the others, but another thing is not even the government knows about this. In the next chapter, it says that she chose an option different to what was expected, yet the drone injected her with both the ability to see color and taste foods. It's unclear to me whether that was a system error, or whether it had done so purposefully—Tessa obviously doesn't know this, but it's not something she considered either.
Another, minor, thing that I didn't quite get was the whole "your choices define where you live", and also how people didn't question this, or at least Tessa didn't. Are the people some kind of experiment, where they weed out the strongest specimens and rid themselves of the rest or...?
Usually, in dystopian novels, the ruling dictator/party/whatnot brainwashes their people with a reason as to why they are doing this. This is a way to placate them, to prevent them from rebelling. Have you ever read 1984 by George Orwell? It's also a dystopian novel, and a lot of the current ones contain elements from this (because it was a relatively new thing back when it was written). I suggest that you read it to help you solidify this world a little better. From what I understand, it's your first time writing for the sci-fi genre, so, of course, there are a lot of plot holes. The things I have mentioned above probably weren't even considered.
The final point I want to make is to not weigh your narration with so much backstory. The second chapter was basically a flashback and did not move the plot forwards. It would work better for you to feed this kind of information in during the next round of choices, it makes things a lot more interesting. It does give us a bit of an insight into Tessa, but this isn't the best way of doing so.
Writing Style:
The writing was simple and clean, I found myself breezing through it. You varied your sentence structure and had an alright range of vocabulary. I did feel like you could've used some more figurative language—the writing was a little black and white.
There was some info-dumping in the place of description—for example, I would've liked to know more about what the city looked like, what people were made to wear, etc. to put Tessa's actions more into context. I also felt like there were a lot of inconsistencies/unanswered questions in the world-building, so some work needs to be done to help tie these loose ends. I suggest you plan this part vigorously because this is what really makes the genre (just as with fantasy).
Characters:
Tessa—The 'odd one out', the rebel of the dystopian world. She's supposed to be very careful about revealing her 'secret', but, instead, isn't. At all. She seemed very careless to me in the way she behaved. In the first three chapters, there are two examples of this: a) Tessa knew that the security droids roamed around at night, yet she always left the Healthy Livings building, like ten minutes before Late Time. Her situation is already very delicate, why would she do that? She should be the first one to leave, to stay as much as she could outside the spotlight, but instead, she's living on the edge. b) She met Emilia only recently, yet, she accidentally confesses that she hasn't been completely truthful with her. She's kept this to herself all this time, she can't be that stressed as to let it slip.
Emilia—The happy, bubbly friend. Completely opposite to Tessa. She's heavily subjugated by the "New Union" and I only got that when she said "weren't we taught to be happy with what we're given?" because I wasn't given any other indication of these teachings in the previous chapters.
Diamond rating ♢ (1—10): 7
The biggest flaw of the story is the lack of consistency in the world-building. A lot of the events that happened were way too coincidental—it's like they were forced to happen so that the plot went in the direction you wanted it. The overarching idea is good, but you need stronger foundations for this story to not fall into the 'underdeveloped cliché dystopian novels' pile. There were also some contradictions between what the character claimed, and the way she actually behaved—I was constantly told that she was paranoid about her secret, but instead did the complete opposite.
Again, to fix all this, I suggest that a) you read published dystopian novels and take note of what makes their worlds so solid (if you already have, I suggest you do it again, but with a critical eye) b) talk to Wattpad authors who are experienced in the genre, and ask them what THEY do to plan their worlds.
Good luck!