Characters: GOT7's Jinyoung, OC.
Reviewer: Minah.
Chapters reviewed: all 30 (approx. 65k words).
Requested on: Jan 8, 2022.
Request completed on: Jan 14, 2022.

picked up and credited

title (3/5)

Poetic and beautiful at first glance, it reflects well with the vibe the story is trying to project. It's eye-catching, yet I do not feel it was given justice after finishing the read - as though I was not really given the thing the title promised to deliver.

I have this impression that the title is giving a hint of a healing romance/ lover for the main protagonist, and that the focus would be going to only one character, but it appears to not be the case.

It does capture a major aspect of the story, but I think there exists a more well-fitted pick for the title in order to represent the whole story, if that makes sense.

DESCRIPTION/ FOREWORD (2/2)

Good description and well-corporated little quote in the foreword! Description introduces very well to who the main characters are and what backgrounds they are in at the start of the story. It stays true to the spirits and aim of the plot.

presentaTION (2/2)

There is nothing negative to be pointed out as for the appearance of the story. You used the default AFF font, good spacing between paragraphs, and the poster is aesthetically pleasing to the eyes all in all.

CHARACTERIZATION (18/30)

1. Jinyoung [5/10]:

While the narration is mostly done through Jinyoung's POV, I failed to see the qualities in his personality that could stand out as a main character.

From all that I have read, I can see he is reserved most of the time, caring to everyone especially to his love interest, and he can crack jokes especially around the people he is close enough with. His passiveness is seen to be subdued gradually when he meets Youngsoon, who seems to awaken emotions and curiosity in him, and is able to make him do what he usually doesn't (as confirmed by himself a couple of times when he acts bold and is active around her). This can be seen as character development, and I would have loved it more if you had gone further with how the change happened, maybe by adding more description and explanations during his narration, before the change, and the process of his thinking more slowly to get readers on the same page.

His activities seem to include only visiting Gureum (as Yoongi has pointed out, he's present there too frequently to the point the former would go as far as- and quite insensitive, to invite him to work for Gureum) after quitting his previous job. While there are sufficient interactions to the people involved in his life, the story does not show what his interests in life are, what he likes and dislikes, what he enjoys doing and what he does not. It could be because of the mental state he is in during the span of the plotline that he just settles with one or two activities day by day, so there was not a lot of room to show the other characteristics he could possibly have.

Regardless, he is to me one of those less memorable characters in the story, which is a pity, because slice-of-life heavy story tends to focus more on the character building and explorations.

2. Youngsoon [5/10]:

Youngsoon is to me, another Jinyoung just with a different background and thrown in different situations.

She can crack jokes, considerate to everyone, and she is introverted in the sense that she conceals her feelings towards most people, save for Jinyoung down the road. A little similarity that is highlighted in different ways between them is perhaps her trying to put up a facade to the world, showing she is okay but inside she is not (by the way she smiles that Jinyoung managed to pick up on the very first time they saw each other); on the other hand, Jinyoung seems to not try to put up a trained smile, but I do feel like he does conceal his insecurities about his loneliness at work in front of his friends (and when he worked for the ious electronics company, it is likely that he hides his hardships and takes everything given to him no matter how impossible the tasks appeared to be, without asking for help or fighting for his rights), thus in a way similar to the way Youngsoon is putting up her 'armour'.

She and Jinyoung are like-minded people, partly proven by the scenes where they perfectly talk with each other with only questions at times. Maybe that's how they came to grow close and can relate to each other, thus be the one who picks up on visual clues on the other's face to act upon it, encourages the other whenever there's a conflict to solve, helps each other untie the knots in their hearts.

It could be that you intentionally made these two characters so similar such that they could easily be attracted to each other and eventually become mutual helper in each other's life, be the source of positive influence because they are able to see what the other doesn't, or refuse to because they are put in such hardship that it is hard to make up a resolution on their own without that little 'push' from someone else.

While it is a nice and fresh approach as opposed to the many stories out there that feature people of almost opposite personalities, I do believe that there is room to slide in something different from Jinyoung to distinguish their characters. Uniqueness is one thing we have against anyone else in the world after all.

There is one instance where Youngsoon's actions do not make sense to me, when she fought with Mark about the old Converse shoes. I get how significant those are to her, being the first ever gift from Mark and the start of a beautiful step-sibling relationship, but aside from that, pardon me, if I were her, I wouldn't mind throwing them away if they were that worn out. I do understand though that she might have wanted to keep them for the memories, but it would have been better if she tried to talk with Mark about it instead of playing silent and being furious with him (it was not that serious of a matter to be angry over, if I haven't missed out any details here).

3. Others [8/10]:

You have one character that serves their purpose well to the plot, which is Mark.

He is one of the most active at driving the plot forward, being the major reason to bring Jinyoung and Youngsoon together. He's vibrant enough for a supporting character. He is my most favorite character, to be frank. He is a bit impatient but understanding, talkative, positive but frank.

He has the most distinct characteristics out of anyone else in the story, so I got this unreasonable hunch that whenever he appeared, the plot was going to move forward another step, which luckily almost always turned out to be true.

While it is good to have a character with such a strong presence like Mark in your story, I think Jinyoung and Youngsoon appear to be even more pale in comparison, which is probably not what we are aiming for at the end of the road.

The other characters, like Joy, and Yoongi, also did moderately well on their parts to serve as the plot device and for our main two to develop. They have their own good and bad sides to them, which helped bring out emotions in Jinyoung and Youngsoon.

On the contrary, I wouldn't say the same for characters like Youngjae and Jaebum, and Jamie and Jackson at the later parts of the story.

For Jamie and Jackson, you allot quite an abundant amount of time to delve into their thought process, backgrounds and dialogues, and I had a false hope that they would be significant enough to be worth mentioning, which turned out not to be the case, unfortunately.

With Youngjae and Jaebum, I feel like their friendship with Jinyoung is only on a surface level. Most of the time, they try to dodge the heavier topics like Jinyoung's hardships at his previous job. Later on in the story, it does get brought up but again, they did not really play a big part in helping Jinyoung get over it, rather it was Jinyoung who decided he was comfortable enough to talk about it.

It was a pity not being able to see much of their friendship in a deeper level as depicted, given Jinyoung mentioned somewhere that they were best friends. They were mostly seen hanging out for drinks and the talking was majorly done from Youngjae's part, which to me served more like just a comedic relief.

plot (18/30)

1. Backstory and conflicts [5/15]:

Jinyoung and Youngsoon has one major conflict each to solve by the end of the story. While conflicts are presented moderately well, I failed to understand their backstories enough to reason their conflicts.

Jinyoung: his work environment in the past was not shown much. He said he felt lonely, okay. He said he did everything that was given to him, okay. He was overwhelmed and eventually he broke down, okay. But what was his boss like? What were his team members like? If he felt lonely there, was it because of lack of communication, or was it because the people around him lacked proper consideration for their colleague?

All in all, I feel like Jinyoung's past was vague, and so it was a bit hard to keep up with his emotions especially in the earlier chapters, partly because it was probably your intentions to make the readers curious to find out more later on. However, I kind of waited for a big drop on his past, the spiciest stuff, but there seemed to be none until the end.

Youngsoon: her conflict seems to be more major, one that has been there for a long time since her mother remarried until the present day. She seemed to be unsatisfied with her living conditions in the States, so she flew back to Korea to pursue her study and career there, away from a family that she seemed to not appreciate. And the armour that she put up, too, seemed to have developed from when she was younger, because she felt like she had to 'behave' given what she was having around her. But that's about how much I could see.

Even more so than Jinyoung, I couldn't see the whole view of her backstory. I failed to connect the dots to how she had become the person she is today. Mark seems like a caring brother even though he is not blood-related to her. And it was shown that she had accepted Mark as her family, so I assumed maybe it was her step-father that was the problem, save for her mother, because I guess mothers are usually supportive and closest to their child.

However, Youngsoon's father was never properly introduced. It was hard to imagine Youngsoon had any reason to escape from her family. The problem is, therefore, what had she experienced before deciding to move to Korea in the first place?

2. Progress to resolution [13/15]:

Jinyoung and Youngsoon have undoubtedly helped each other out to reach the final destination of their emotional turmoil. In general, each action the characters took felt in place, nothing too unreasonable or forced. It takes some strong pushes from the supporting characters for them to react and develop, but overall, good job planning out the events!

Jinyoung was happy at the end with his job under Mark, and it was clear that he got fun people around him to work with, a caring boss, and he got the right workload (at least until this point it seems) for himself.

The only thing that might have bothered me enough to point out is that the solution to Youngsoon's problem seems to be a little bit too simple, regarding her family. Her working at Gureum has been there from the beginning of the story, and at the end, she still stayed at Gureum, which is not the problem, but I felt rather confused as to how much she struggled to realize that she made the right decision by doing whatever she wanted with her life.

flow/ pace (6/10)

A slice-of-life story is bound to have this laid back, slow pace and this story sure took its time to explore each experience the characters are having. However, it seems to me that a few elements could be cut out without affecting the main flow of the story, hence throughout the story, the reading experience might be made more tedious than one might have wanted.

Firstly, scenes of supporting characters like Jackson and Jamie when they bicker could be shortened with paraphrasing what they talked about instead of giving them dialogues. I have a strong belief that whenever someone talks in a story, then it's worth taking notes or at least serving a purpose to the plot. However, whenever they bicker, I couldn't see the significance of those scenes.

Next, scenes where Youngsoon discussed the teahouse's menu of the day felt like fillers to me. While they showed her professionalism and competence in her field, I think they are skipabble. The same goes for the description of how the food tastes. In my opinion, scenes like this suit more to a story where people compete with each other in a sense. In here, there's no rival to Youngsoon that I can pinpoint. It's not that they shouldn't be there at all, but just giving emphasization on the main details would be better.

WRITING + grammar (14/20)

1. Writing:

a. Narration [4/5]:

It seemed that you chose third-person omniscient POV for this story, meaning you can show many characters' thinking and feeling at once.

While it is completely fine doing so, there are times when I get confused to whose voice you are lending in your narration; this in turn disturbs the flow of the story, as readers might have to pause and re-read to understand which character is narrating through the story. I believe this issue can be fixed easily if the narrator uses neutral tone when describing things around them unless a name is mentioned within a paragraph.

This issue is not present that often, if I remember correctly, so it is not that big of a problem to me.

I really like when the narration is taken by Jinyoung. Maybe because he is more reserved, he tends to observe and describe better than anyone else. I think this story could be written entirely through his point of view without much difficulty in delivering the plot points.

c. Writing style [10/15]:

Your variety of vocabulary shines the most when you do paragraphs of emotion-related description, with decent comparisons and abstraction. Your style changes to each character's narration though, it seems, because you can go and describe things in a more blunt, simple way. With the healing vibe you are pursuing, as I have mentioned earlier, I would much prefer if you stuck with only Jinyoung's POV.

I often feel like skipping dialogue tags in your story. Maybe because the tags were getting repetitive, as you tend to use a few words regularly. Maybe because there are dialogues that are not exactly necessary. Regardless, there is often times this imbalance in pace when it comes to dialogues-heavy parts as compared to description-heavy parts while I read your story, which could be avoidable by adding variety to the tags, have your characters speak less, or adding more description in between each dialogue if it serves as one of the more important plot points.

2. Grammar [-0]:

There are no glaring mistakes I could find. Only a few spelling errors were spotted. As someone who uses English on the conversational level, I will not dwell on this area that much, my apologies for that!

personal enjoyment (0.2/1)

My apologies, slice of life is not my favorite genre, and I am not a big fan of Jinyoung, so I strongly believe I could have enjoyed it more had it been about my favs.

Right from the start, I was prepared to read a slow-paced, character-driven story. As I go further, I do think the story still keeps heading its direction strongly, but the way it pans out seems to have been more grand than I had initially expected, with more characters being introduced, and a few subplots that I was not fully invested in.

I was also distracted trying to look for the logics behind our main characters' minds, as well as their backstories, so it did make the reading more stressful, when I should have had a more open mind reading a healing-oriented story.

total: 63.2/100

★reviewer's notes:

If you haven't noticed, I have made some changes to my review rubrics, so the scoring is not to be compared with what I have done before. I'm still experimenting, trying to figure out how I value each aspect of the story and weigh them in the most reasonable way possible. While I tried to stay as objective as I could, I strongly believe this review is still biased. If I have made any mistakes in analyzing your story, if there are any points I didn't make clear, or if you have any concerns at all, please do point them out so that I can use the knowledge to better my future judgment. As a side node, I tend to focus on the negatives. If something was not brought up, then I think you are doing great with it!

Thank you again for the request! I hope the review was of some help to you. I look forward to your opinions regarding my review, and happy writing!