Bare Lady

Reviewer: Moelolz

Story Link: Here 

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Story Title: (4/5)

In my opinion, this is a good title you’ve got here. For one, it’s original and suits the theme of your story, and secondly, it’s an interesting yet simple title.

In my opinion, there are two types of simplicity to a title. One is the good type of simplicity; though simple, it still shows strength and will spark the readers’ interest. Due to the simplicity of the title, it may leave an impression on the readers or that one simple word will ignite something within the readers that may prompt them to click on it. The other type of simplicity though, is the type where it’s overly simple. I wouldn’t say that it’s bad though…but just a little plain. There’s no wow factor to the title, and it just seems a bit dull.

In your case, I think your title fits into the first category. When I first saw the title, it sparked an interest in me immediately, partly because I was curious to how this title would come to play with your story, and partly because I knew that this story wouldn’t be your typical chick flick story, but one with deeper depth in it.

Graphics: (7/10)

Before I write anything more, let me just get it straight that the current graphics you have now is fine given that it’s not messy or conflicting with the idea of your story. But I do think that it could be done better to highlight the mood of your story, and below will just be some suggestions I have as to how I think it could be improved. (But do keep in mind that this is all my personal preference.)

First up, since I get a quite angsty and melancholy feel from your story, I think the graphics are a bit too…warm and light-hearted I guess? I mean, the poster is very pretty as well as the light blue background with flowers, but I would expect something darker and colder, something more along the cold side of the colour wheel. Something like a grey or greyish-blue theme.

Since you only do have five chapters right now so I can’t be too sure where the story will be heading in the future, but from what I’ve read so far, I feel like this story is going to be quite a heart-wrenching one. I think in order to set the mood better for that ‘heart-wrenching’ atmosphere, I do think you should tone the warmness of your graphics down a little and add a bit more harshness and cold reality to it, if you get what I mean.

Of course, your graphics wouldn’t determine the mood of your story, but from what I see, just as much as a title should reflect the plot, the graphics should as well. Right now, your graphics is fine, but personally, I don’t think it accentuates your story and gives it that push and edge.

Description and Foreword: (8/10)

I like your Description! Just like your title, it is simple yet gives out all the necessary information needed to catch the reader’s attention. I like that quote you put it as well, it really does suit well with the ‘Bare Lady’ sort of theme in your story.

Despite that, there is just one thing I would like to concentrate on, and that is your blurb. I think that the blurb of your story could be reworded a little to fit the story more:

Original: The population of ageing citizens had raised significantly and the only way they could solve the problem is by forcing high school students to bear at least one child. Tiffany who had been surviving all the cruel years since young soon faced another challenge. A challenge she thought would be a no problem until she meets this young man.

Revised: With the population of senior citizens rising significantly, the younger generations were decreasing rapidly. Henceforth, the government thought up a plan to solve this problem: and that is to force high school students to bear the responsibility of giving birth to at least one child. This leaves Tiffany, a girl who survived many years of hardships and cruelty to be faced with another challenge. A challenge she thought wouldn’t be a problem until she met a certain young man.

Ok, so as you probably can see here, I did not change the meaning of your blurb at all, but deleted and added in parts to connect it better. Firstly, in your original description, you did not give a defined enough reason as to why ‘they’ had to force high school students to bear children. Theoretically speaking, a population rise of senior citizens does not necessary mean that the population of younger generations would decrease, so I think it would be better to actually mention the fact that the younger generations are decreasing. Also, who are ‘they’? It is always important to remember that your readers cannot read your mind, so instead of using vague terms like ‘they’, you should actually introduce who ‘they’ are; in your case, the government.

Anyhow, I only understood your blurb completely after reading your story, but the blurb is there so you can understand the general plot before you read the story. So yeah, this is just the one thing I would like to point out for this section. The rest is fine, great job!

Characterization: (9/10)

Your characters are well-structured and quite realistically thought-out. Though you do only have a few chapters so your characters are still in the developing stage, but so far, it’s pretty good. I like how you gave your readers reasons as to why each character’s personality and actions is how it is, (for instance, Tiffany being quite self-conscious and polite due to her humiliating past and the accusations made on her) and I especially like how you didn’t just tell me about them, but brought the characters to life by showing me their personality through their actions.  

Anyway, I gave you a high mark on this section, so there isn’t really anything else to mention for this part, moving on.

Plot and Consistency: (35/40)

I love the plot! Despite what you said about it being clichéd and all that, I personally am quite intrigued by the whole idea. I think you gave the commonly used idea its own spark, and you had me hooked throughout the first five chapters. The flow was great, I didn’t see any irrational or unreasonable jumps between plot, and your plot follows a consistent and logical timeline.

The only thing I would say about it though, is that you left a lot of loopholes in the plot that had me confused until it was resolved a few chapters later. It’s great that you actually solved the unanswered questions in your plot, but for a few chapters I was quite confused and was constantly wondering about those questions. For instance, the part where Kai suddenly shouted that he didn’t want to be with a child of a murderer, I found it a bit sudden since when the two got called to be partners, you didn’t mention any signs of disgust from Kai so I just assumed he was fine with it (he even draped his arm around the back of her chair) when all of a sudden, he hates her. It’s totally fine that it turned out this way, but I feel like there could be a bit more of a transition in between.

For example, you could’ve mention something like ‘Kai let out an annoyed sigh and rolled his eyes as he shot Sooyeon a contemptuous look’ and the sort to hint the readers that the two knew each beforehand and clearly isn’t in a favourable relationship. Then, when Kai started shouting that he didn’t wanted to be with ‘that damned girl’, it would be more understandable than him suddenly saying that when before he just sat down next to her and flipped through the pages without any signs of rejection.

Grammar and Writing style: (17/20)

Let’s start with your writing style. I absolutely adore the way you describe and write, there were many phrases and parts in there that really struck me as outstanding descriptions, and your writing is absolutely alive and dancing. I like your use of repetition and you use italics well. Excellent job!

Now, moving on to the grammatical and technical sections. Honestly speaking, I’m not exactly the grammar person since I do English literature and we focus more on finding the themes and motifs in stories over spelling mistakes, but since English is my first language, I did notice a few quirks here and there in which I will revise below:
 

Original: Jongin sighs. It was a harsh exhale, the type that people did when they felt angry but didn’t want to let it show.

Revised: Jongin sighs. It is a harsh exhale, the type that people do when they feel angry but doesn’t want to let it show.

Here is a grammatical problem that I find the most challenging personally: tenses. Throughout your story, you would often shift from present to past tense, making it hard for me to distinguish the tense that you were using. In this particular sentence, you used present tense in the first phrase, but the second part quickly switched to past tense. All I did here was make it all present tense for unification of tense and a more fluent flow of speech.

Original: The warm breeze of spring, with the after-smell of rain sinking into her skin.

Revised: The warm breeze of spring, along with the after-smell of rain sinks into her skin.

As it is a complete sentence up there, it sounded unfinished when you use the word ‘sinking’, so I changed it to ‘sinks’ which gave it a more resolute and finished feeling.

Anyway, most of the errors I found were either one of the two above; tense problem or just sentence structuring. You didn’t have that much problem in this section, and though many parts of your story does feel a bit rough grammatically, but it was good enough in terms that the grammatical errors didn’t distract me from the emotions and plot of the story.

Reviewer’s enjoyment: (5/5)

I really enjoyed your story! I’m going to keep myself subscribed to your story and can’t wait to see more from you, fighting!

♠ TOTAL SCORE: 85/100