Title: Keeping Secrets
Author:BeccaAndCarly
Genre: Teen Fiction/Romance
Rating: PG, but I feel like the more into the story it will be PG-13.
# of chapters: 5 (ongoing)
# of chapters I read: 2
Summary/Blurb:
This is a guide, that will help you through your life. Help you learn from the mistakes I've made as a teenager. The lies I keep up. Sure, my life was good at first. Lying was easy, but with a huge secret..it just gets harder and harder.
Use this guide to learn from my wisdom as a college student. Sure, I'm not the brightest. That would be Rider. Everyone gets wisdom from living life. I sure have been living life, just the wrong way....
Review:
Cover:
This looks a lot like the cover for a diary, and the title fits it. I like the ornamental design you used, I've seen it on hardcopy books before (and drapes), but the pink in the corners and around the center doesn't really sit right with me. It makes it blatantly obvious that this cover has been made digitally. What you should try to go for is a cover that really emulates the one of a college student's diary. It has to look like it's been thumbed through a lot, doodled on, the title has to look like it was written in pen...etc. Basically, try to imagine how your protagonist would keep a journal because the way it looks like is reflective of their personality and way-of-life.
Blurb:
I'm not a fan of blurbs in the first person because you miss out on a lot of information which can only really be told through the third person perspective. Like in this case, I don't even know what the protagonist's name is, and it doesn't really make m want to find out either. Here's why:
This is supposed to be some kind of 'guide' to survive life, but it's written by a college student...what kind of life advice can a 20-year-old give you? They still have their whole lives in front of them! If it was an 80-year-old lady, that has lived life to the fullest and is now spending her retirement writing a memoir, then that would be much more interesting. Elderly people rarely admit to having done rebellious/naughty things, especially in the presence of the younger generations, so when you do find out what Grandma Nora did back in 1952, you remain shocked for life. You thought that all she did was bake cookies and knit sweaters? Think again.
But the protagonist keeps talking about how she lived life the wrong way, lied, etc., but it's all very ambiguous. What bad things could she have done? Snort cocaine, cheat on someone, party hard...? Like there's nothing unusual there (unless she killed a man, then things start getting interesting) that I haven't seen before in other stories, and nothing about it really hooked me as a potential reader.
Overall—Meh. I suggest that you rewrite this blurb, use the third person perspective, and spice things up a bit.
First Impression:
*cracks fingers* Let's get started, shall we?
The first part (the one before the break) seemed disjointed from the rest of the chapter. I didn't quite get the point of it except for being an attempt to create sympathy for the protagonist. The issue is, I've been told several times in the blurb that the girl is harboring this life-changing secret and it's repeated a million times here as well. It gives too much of the story away and is practically a (vague) summary of the plot. I rather see for myself how she "kept her loved ones safe from her past", rather than being told that she did so in the beginning.
There is also a change in the POV used, it goes from the first person to the third person (it's strange how she refers to herself in the third person). Basically, I think the chapter would do much better without this part—I found the ensuing section about her getting out of jail to be much more engaging than this, which appeared to have been added just for the sake of hiking up the word count.
Moving on, the chapter was short. Chapter length is usually not an issue because it's quality > quantity, except that this one lacked a lot of detail, making the character's reactions to her environment seem overly-dramatic and unjustified. Plus, it was hard for me to get a sense of her location.
The role of the first chapter is to hook the reader (I was hooked when I read "Vanessa Morgan, the charges are dropped.") introduce the character (which you have done) the setting (which you haven't) all while trying to make the reader care for the character. I'll talk about this later in the character section.
So, now, back to the issues I found in this chapter.
There was a lot of telling and not showing. We go through Vanessa getting out of jail, getting picked up by her mom, arguing with her mom, but it all fell kind of flat for me. I didn't feel particularly connected to the character and here's why:
Vanessa seeing that green-eyed kid and the van parked right outside the county jail seemed like arbitrary plot devices. I was under the impression that both things are going to resurface later on in the story, so you forced their foreshadowing in. Emphasis was placed on these things when it should've been placed on Vanessa—there was no description of the jail cell, of how she felt about getting her clothes back and retrieving her father's watch....
The chapter should've had more of a focus on Vanessa's thoughts and feelings about having been locked up for an entire two months. Instead, all I get on the matter is "The dump I spent my summer vacation at. Not like I was going to do anything, but sit at home anyway." and then it's pretty much brushed off like it's no big deal. There is no mention of whether she went to trial or anything, why the jail was such a 'dump', why she got thrown into jail in the first place, or whether she cares or not about having a criminal record.
Her mother also seems oblivious to all of this. She seems oblivious to everything, to be honest, and to me, didn't come across as a parent that doesn't give a single shit about their kid. She came across to me as a robot, both in her actions and reactions. The woman is supposedly playing the role of the uncaring parent, but it almost felt like she was a D-list actor in a bad movie, especially during the back-and-forth between mother and daughter:
"[...] I was there because of your stupid ex!"
"Don't talk about Jonathan that way!"
"Do you hear anything I ever say? [...]"
The woman doesn't even try to defend herself or anything, in fact, each one of her lines seems to have been taken from a Romance novel— which wouldn't be too much of an issue if I was shown how heartless this woman was. If I was shown how she spent more time with her boyfriends than with her own daughter.
For the benefit of the doubt, I went on to read the second chapter...and it seemed to be all over the place. The majority of it was the protagonist giving, once again, advice that seems unrelated to the story itself, this new character, Rider is introduced, while the mother just vanishes into thin air. Then there is a jump to three years in the future...? Also, the fact that the character just got out of jail is completely forgotten, as is the mother-daughter fight.
Just by reading the first two chapters, I could already tell that this 'guide' needs to be restructured. This needs to be approached differently, because most of the time, I had no idea what was going on. You're trying to have the story follow its own timeline, while at the same time, trying to include advice that is not related to the story itself at all. Like in chapter 2, you give us a quote: "If you stay true to yourself, then you should stay true to everyone else." Yet, this isn't incorporated into the story itself. The chapter basically revolves around Rider flirting with Vanessa, and then the two teasing each other as they pick a movie.
Basically, if you want this to work, each chapter needs to have some kind of theme, while, at the same time, following a timeline. There needs to be an introductory chapter (before chapter one) in which Vanessa talks about why she decided to write this guide, who inspired her to write it, and what structure she's going to be following. This has to be clear as glass, and here is an example:
1. Quote for the chapter.
2. Vanessa discusses this quote and gives related advice.
3. A Scenario from her life (I suggest that you write out a timeline of the story, and shape the quotes/advice around this, not vice-versa. Otherwise, it's hard to correlate the quote/advice, with the story)
Writing Style:
There were a lot of grammatical and punctuational mistakes. A few examples are:
a) Differences between "your" and "you're".
b) Switches in tenses.
c) Misplacement/lack of commas.
There was no figurative/emotive language employed, and the vocabulary was simplistic to the degree where there was a lot of redundancy. For example: "My life was a mess because of one stupid secret. It was a secret that changed my life. It was a secret that shouldn't have been a secret in the first place." These sentences basically went in circles.
There was barely any characterization of the protagonist, settings, etc. and the guide book didn't follow a specific structure, which I think is one of the biggest downfalls of this book.
Characters:
Vanessa—Behaved more like a child than a teenager. She was whiny, annoying, unnecessarily dramatic, and I didn't enjoy reading the story from her perspective because her character didn't have any emotional depth to her. She didn't reflect over her time in jail, over her relationship with her mother, and what she did say was superficial and unfounded. College-Vanessa was a lot more interesting.
Mother—Poor woman. She's made to look like the bad guy of the story, yet, I was really shown how bad she was. It was like all her responses to her daughter were pre-recorded, and their conversations were like a tennis match. Back-and-forth without any actions, emotions, nothing. I don't even know what she looks like.
Rider—The hot guy friend. Vanessa says he's "over-protective like her father" when all he told her was that she should keep the back door to her house locked in case someone tried to sneak in. It's not that he even nagged her about her safety, it was just an observation.
Diamond rating ♢ (1—10): 5
This guidebook was a 'miss' for me. The messages Vanessa sent over were merely philosophical with no proper evidence to back them up—the characters were all 2D and hard to relate to, and there were a lot of holes in the plot that made it hard to make the protagonist's relatable. At times, it felt like I was reading a script rather than a story.
Good luck with the edits and the book!