A Price To Pay by theloveinlife

Reviewed by unnamed1demannu (Lia)

Non-graded:

Title: It's really generic. "A price to pay" can refer to a lot, and doesn't really grab your attention.

Description/Foreword: The description is vaguely interesting, but it seems like you just picked as many big, "smart"-looking words as possible and just smashed them all together. The random bolding seems a bit childish, as well.

Appearance: You font is nice and readable, and yay for pretty graphics.

Enjoyment: I started off not liking the story (the first two or three chapters were slow, disjointed, and really didn't catch my attention well.) By the ninth chapter or so, I actually got into the story. The tenth chapter made me cringe a bit at the predictability, and the finale varied (the first chapter was okay, I had to suspend disbelief a bit for the third, but I liked the second).

You also get enjoyment points for Kyuwook, which is probably my second OTP. Just saying.

Graded:

Plot: ★★★★ (4/5)

I got really confused at first, because I just thought that Sungmin was Kyuhyun's boytoy and Yesung just cared for Ryeowook. Then, I was confused about who had proposed to Ryeowook and who was trying to break them apart (it said Yesung once in the chapter, and then said "Kyuhyun is destroyed" later, which I thought could mean that Kyuhyun was so messed up he'd be willing to sabotage his love's life). The way you wrote the chapters - with very ambiguous pronouns much of the way through, and then a kind of punch at the end - didn't help the confusion.

However, confusion aside, it wasn't a bad plot. There was something of a classic "romance/Romeo and Juliet" undertone, and I guessed that Ryeowook would get hit by a car because, well, road, and that's used so much in those kinds of romantic twists. The buildup, though confusing, was done in a way that brought everything together by the end. There weren't really huge plotholes or loose ends that I could see.

My problem with the ending was that technically, both Ryeowook and Sungmin were at fault for Ryeowook's death. Ryeowook had ran out into the road suddenly; Sungmin could easily plead that he couldn't have stopped in time, and so hit Ryeowook entirely by accident. That would be a possible charge of negligence, I think, but not one of murder. It would be easy to get him off - it may not have even went to court, unless they found suspicious evidence (but it didn't seem premediated).

Characterization: ★★★ (3/5)

Ryeowook was helpless, depressed, and emotional - that's all I got. It was a solid characterization, but not a dynamic one, and he just got on my nerves by the end. He wasn't very relatable - he reminded me of those girls in Asian dramas that always get hurt from the stupidest things and always need guys to rescue them. He was boring, but at least he had a personality.

Yesung and Kyuhyun seemed interchangeable. They both loved Ryeowook, they both were a bit cold and not the nicest people on the planet. It seemed that, had the circumstances been different, Yesung could have been the one that ended up being Ryeowook's fiancé and Kyuhyun the one that drove Yesung into bankruptcy. Neither of them were bad or boring characters (especially Yesung - I liked his turmoil over how to deal with Ryeowook, about his unrequited love and his jealousy. He was a dynamic, interesting character). There was, however, a sense that neither of them were really original or interesting while reading simply because they were so much alike. When looked at separately, Yesung and Kyuhyun are good characters. When put together in a story like this, they just became redundant.

I wasn't sure whether to pity Sungmin at the beginning or not (sob stories annoy me, and by the time his father got out of jail, he'd have been 23 years old - that wouldn't count as a "young boy" at all in my book). I felt his jealousy could be understandable, given the circumstances of his past and being used to Kyuhyun so much (emotional manipulation on Kyuhyun's part, perhaps?), but his mental deterioration was sudden and seemed unrealistic. His chapter in the finale made it seem like he'd just cracked after Kyuhyun had told him about Ryeowook and proceeded to become a raging homicidal maniac or something. I think it would have been better if he was more tortured over his decision - somewhat more Magneto than the Joker, if that makes any sense.

Flow: ★★ (2/5)

By the time I got into the story, the lack of flow didn't really bother me. At the beginning, though, it was probably one of the main factors that contributed to my boredom.

Like in the description, you tended to use a lot of fancy adjectives, many that didn't make sense in the context of the story. You also tried to go "poetic", I think, with the bolding and the italicizing and the parentheses. I personally don't mind italicizing, but bolding is distracting and screams that you're trying too hard. Of course, that's a personal  preference, so there's absolutely no need to change it.

The fancy adjectives were distracting - it was as if you'd randomly stuck in random words at times. There were also cases of redundancy - "vexed and absolutely frustrated" basically means "frustrated and even more frustrated". You had a couple noun-verb discrepancies as well, but those could be typos (weeks of loneliness have, not has).

I personally love using parentheses in my own writing. However, I treat these as asides to the audience, and therefore keep everything related to the idea in the parenthesis. Sometimes, it means that I have an entire paragraph (or two) in parenthesis. That's okay. What doesn't work so well in yours is that you put a dependent clause in parenthesis, and then refer directly back to them in the next sentence. If you're going to do that, what's the point of putting the parentheses in? It would be better just to not have them at all.

In the first chapter in particular, you did quite a bit of switching between third-person limited omniscient and third-person omniscient. It got confusing, because some parts were from Kyuhyun's  POV, quite obviously, and then some parts were completely disconnected from his thoughts, seemingly told from the POV of the world or something. (e.g. "the room finds peace again" would be more omniscient, while the things related to how Kyuhyun feels would be limited.)

Grammar/Spelling: ★★★★ (4/5)

Overall, it was decent. There were weird word choices at times (Yesung "whips" tears off of Ryeowook's face; it probably should have been "wipes"; you use "hence" when "therefore" would work better), and I think there's a couple things about idioms (common English phrases) that were missed (usage of on vs. in vs. as, for example).

Originality: ★★★ (3/5)

As I said before, I expected that Ryeowook would be hit by a car, and I expected that Sungmin would have something to do with it, seeing as that's how jealous exes deal with things in a lot of works of fiction. As I also said before, there were serious elements of Romeo and Juliet. However, it wasn't entirely cliché, and there were some interesting points (and it was written pretty well).

Overall: ★★★ (3/5)

The flow (or lack thereof) and some of the confusion threw me off, but it was still a good read. The ending lines about seven spaces down from the rest of the story annoyed me as well, since they had an emotional effect the first two or so times, but then they just got repetitive and boring. If Ryeowook got less whiny, it would also be more enjoyable - I wouldn't want to tell him to man the hell up all the time.

i had homework, so i decided to do a review.

look at how smart i am.

anyways. hope that it was satisfactory? sorry; it was a bit rushed. it really wasn't too bad; i just don't like that kind of romancey-sob-story-type thing.