(July 2015)

Title: Broken Memory Bank
Author: pinkblink

Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Title: (3)/5

When I first saw your title, I wasn’t very impressed at all. However, I’ll definitely admit that the more I repeat it to myself, the more it grows on me? It’s a bit odd, but I’ll take it as it is. There’s also a clear connection to the plot of your story which is always important.

Description/Foreword: (9)/10

The content of your description/foreword is definitely unique enough to catch my attention. In all honesty, the only issues that I have with it are mostly due to concerns over your writing style. There’s some awkward word choice (“...achieved status being..”) and you have a lot of redundancy (“EXO Hotels hotel chain”) that is made even more obvious by your repetitive diction.

All of that aside though, your set-up is absolutely gorgeous and casts a good aura for the type of story you’re about to share, and the short excerpt of dialogue between Sehun and Su Ah definitely intrigued me. Reading your author’s note also made me super excited to read the story since I absolutely adore Reign and hearing about an author who’s purposely trying to make me dislike their characters sets the hype to an all new level—the expectations are definitely high.

(Your signature at the end is also super cute, by the way.)

Plot: (27)/30

While your story currently has a total of nine chapters, in all reality, the material has really only covered the exposition of your story, so it’s a bit difficult for me to accurately judge your overall storyline. From what I’ve seen so far though, everything looks like it’s on the right track.

I stated in the previous section that I had pretty high expectations for your story and you definitely didn’t disappoint. I was a bit nervous since the “amnesia” idea has been used a lot and not always very well. However, your execution of the plot device was done with a nicely subtle twist. Sehun’s amnesia is only being used as an additional factor to the story’s problem—the story doesn’t revolve solely around his memory loss and the medical condition feels genuine and not an auxiliary something that was added just for the sake of making your plot more interesting.

Your perfect usage of dramatic irony is what makes everything mesh so well together, I think. Not many authors are able to write in such a style, and I’m so impressed that you were able to pull it off the way that you did. When Sehun first loses his memories, the reader knows more about him than he does. I was surprised to find out just how much was going on in the story that the reader didn’t know from the beginning in regards to Sehun. Moments like Su Ah’s depression and the couple’s miscarriage came as a shock, and due to Sehun’s memory loss, I felt like we were reacting in tandem with him when the revelations come alight.

Combining the “amnesia” plot device with your dramatic irony creates the perfect atmosphere and flow for this kind of story, making it a true standout.

Another aspect of your story that I really enjoyed was your subtle hints to the characters troublesome pasts. In Chapter Four, for example, you state that “Krystal was no longer eighteen and hurt”. Without drawing too much attention to her history, you let your readers know that there’s indeed something there that increases the ever-building tension of your story. You raises a lot of questions that we want answers to, therefore increasing your story’s readability and making it all the more addicting.

There were, however, a few moments in the plot that made me question the validity of certain moments of the story. For example, how would Sehun be able to recognize an antidepressant from just looking at a pill? It’s one thing if some of his memories are coming back, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. It would’ve been more realistic for him to ask Su Ah what the pill was instead of just throwing out a blind assumption like that and being correct.

More notably, it kind of bothers me that when Sehun’s at the after party of Krystal’s fashion show, people seem (for the most part) unaware of his retrograde amnesia. Sehun is the head of a major corporation and a car accident resulting in a severe health condition is kind of a big deal—you kind of think that something like that would be all over the news. You mention at some point that there were “rumors” about it, but if Sehun’s really as important as he’s made out to be, then the rumors would probably have a lot evidence to them because of the nature of the media, and his company (or at least Jongdae) would have to release a statement on the matter. That’s just how the world works. Jinri being completely caught offguard by Sehun seems  a little odd to me because I would imagine that she would pay special attention to any news that had to do with her lover. I think that her approach should’ve been a lot more smoother than it ended up being if she had known information despite her understandable desperation.

I’m also remotely curious as to what happened to Baekhyun and Zitao. I kind of assume that they drifted apart from Sehun when he turned cold, but I would imagine that Sehun would be more eager for their company following his memory loss since they’re the only friends he can actually remember. He doesn’t ask what happened to them or try to get into contact with them even though I think that would be the normal reaction to his situation. I hope that you get to this eventually in your story.

When Jinri mentioned the photos from Paris in Chapter Seven, I was really excited to see that there was another chapter to the story because I was hoping that I would be able to see what it was, so I have to admit that I was kind of disappointed by the short nature of your most recent chapter—of course, it’s only because I’m just really eager for more. I like how you ended it with hints that Su Ah has a memory problem. It only hypes me up for the next chapter even more, haha.

Characterization: (19)/20

It’s clear right off the bat that your story is very character-driven and so far, you’re doing a wonderful job. The tension in the contradicting relationships is already so strong despite the fact that your story is just starting out, and it gives me shivers thinking about how juicy everything’s going to get once things start to intensify.

In all honesty, I always get kind of nervous whenever I see that someone’s including an OC into their story. However, Su Ah proved herself to be a three-dimensional character that I can’t wait to hear more about. It’s so clear that she’s gone through a lot, but she doesn’t strike me as a Mary Sue in any sense of the word because of your execution of her story. Her relationship with Sehun is interesting to say the least, and an aura of mystery shrouds her character since she’s the first character you really pin as knowing more than anyone else, especially about Sehun and his situation. The line that really sealed the deal for me in regards to loving her characterization was in Chapter Five: “Su Ah couldn’t decide which one she hated more: pre-amnesia or post-amnesia Sehun.” This sentence solidifies the idea that her relationship with Sehun is even more complicated than we were led to initially believe—which really says something.

Such a sentiment is intensified by the occasional splicing of their initial history with each other as well as their first interaction following Sehun’s accident. Seriously, well done.

Jongin maintains the slick characteristics that he’s usually bestowed with in fanfics, but your portrayal of him felt genuine and fresh. I was wondering when he was going to finally be introduced to us, but when I got to his introductory conversation with Krystal (that brown suit topic though, lol), I knew that it was definitely worth the wait. The entire discussion between the two of them seemed to set them up as one of the solid couples of the story: they each radiated charisma and complimented one another’s personalities perfectly. So having him turn around and suddenly reveal that he was completely bored the whole time after he gets what he wants was such a surprise to me. His relationship with Su Ah is such a contrast from his budding relationship with Krystal, but I’m impressed by how he maintains the character you’ve molded him into in each of the different situations—it makes him feel all the more realistic.

Jinri’s one of my all-time biggest biase, and I’m so happy with all the justice you’ve done to her character. From her insistence that she’ll be alright to her concern over those she cares about, she’s immediately pinned as the character we should feel bad for. The way she holds herself during her conversation with Chanyeol proves that she has a very resigned strength to her persona, and when it’s revealed what she’s had to do in order to maintain her career, you can’t help but both pity and admire her. I like the relationship she has with Chanyeol since it seems almost sibling-like and like something we don’t really see in the story—which is funny since there’s an actual pair of siblings present. Since she’s written to be so likable, it makes her situation with Sehun and his memory loss sting all the more. At the end of Chapter Three, when she tries to call him and he doesn’t pick up the phone, I was dying. It was awesome.

Sehun as your main was written pretty nicely as well, but he comes off as less interesting than the rest of you characters. I think that this is mostly because he’s the one we’re experiencing your story vicariously through, but it might also have to do with the contradicting voice you’ve cast upon him. There are moments when he’s being dumb (thinking the nurse was dressed up for Halloween) and there are moments when he shows incredible sensitivity (when he made Su Ah breakfast and talked to her in the car) and there are moments when he seems easily irritable (how quickly he got irritated by Jinri) and there are moments when he seemed way too trusting (accepting Luhan and Jongin’s friendship so instantaneously)—and together, the moments don’t seem very cohesive. I think that you should work on solidifying Sehun’s personality so that we know just what to expect from him and his moments don’t feel so abrupt.

Grammar: (13)/15

Your grammar is pretty spot-on throughout the duration of your story. Your biggest issue would be that occasionally your word choice is inaccurate. An example of this would be in chapter five, “The feeling of sorry…” which should probably be “The feeling of guilt…” and chapter six, “... the event was packed filled with people…” which should be corrected to “... the event was packed full of people…”

Otherwise, your only other problem would be the occasional comma omission; don’t forget to put a comma before a name when someone is being addressed in your dialogue.

Writing Style: (7)/15

Your writing style is definitely where the most improvement can be done. It wasn’t by any means unreadable, but it could definitely use some sprucing up. The syntax of your story was made very bland since you really only use simple sentences, so the sentence flow felt kind of boring. An easy way to fix that up would be to use other forms of punctuation in your writing such as em dashes and semicolons.

As I mentioned briefly in the “Description/Foreword” section of this review, your diction can sometimes be a bit repetitive. In your actual story, it didn’t really strike me as problematic until Chapter Four with “house slippers”. Try to pull out a thesaurus to find some synonyms, or if none of them really fit, reread what you’ve written and see if it’ll still make sense to simply drop the world. Here’s an example of what I mean using an excerpt of your writing from Chapter Four:

“Kicking off her hot pink stilettos, Krystal slipped into her baby blue house slippers. She felt her feet sink comfortably into the soft material of her house slippers and Krystal was once again glad she’d made the right decision to invest in them. In Krystal’s opinion, her baby blue house slippers were a great investment. Adulthood had kicked in years ago and her figure and health condition was no longer fit enough to wear pink stilettos for so many hours.”

I went ahead and underlined each time you repeated “house slippers”. You can’t really remove the first instance since it introduces the subject of the paragraph. The second instance, however, can be removed because it’s a logical assumption that the subject hasn’t changed from the previous sentence to this one. The third instance’s entire sentence can actually be removed as well since it simply repeats the sentiments of the latter half of your second sentence. Keeping in this mind, let’s see how the excerpt would look when we make these changes.

“Kicking off her hot pink stilettos, Krystal slipped into her baby blue house slippers. She felt her feet sink comfortably into the soft material and Krystal was once again glad she’d made the right decision to invest in them. Adulthood had kicked in years ago and her figure and health condition was no longer fit enough to wear pink stilettos for so many hours.”

The excerpt now reads a lot better and even opens up more room for you to add in some imagery in the second sentence.

Something that I really like about your writing style though is that you always end each chapter with something for the reader to think about, whether it be a hint about a secret that a certain character is hiding or the verbally ironic “Bestest friends you’ll ever have” from Jongin.

Personal Enjoyment: (5)/5

On my previous aff account, I was an avid Jinri/Sehun/Jongin/Soojung writer—they were always my go-to muses and I can honestly say that those were the stories that I think I had the most fun writing. Reading your story definitely brought me back to those days and catching up with your most recent chapter almost makes me want to start writing for the four of them again. You captured a lot of elements that I usually saw in fics with these four (most notably, the Jongin/Soojung relationship dynamic) but changed them into something that was unique to your story. You’ve set up a wonderful exposition here for the rest of your story, and I’m so excited to find out more about the characters you’ve introduced us to as you (hopefully) continue to update.

Total Score: 83/100

Reviewer’s Comments: I’ll be quite honest with you, when I first saw your name, there was something very familiar about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was only when I looked through your stories and spotted Typos and Blinking Cursors that I realized that I’ve read some of your work before, haha. It’s been roughly two years, but it’s so amazing to see how much you’ve improved as a writer. This story is b to the edges with potential and I’m crossing my fingers in the hope that you’ll decide to see this story through until the very end. In your original request form, you mentioned that you believe your story is “flawed in many ways,” but I don’t think that’s the case at all. My biggest advice to you would be to work on enhancing your writing style (which, again, shouldn’t be too difficult since it’s clear that you have a certain degree of mastery over the English language) and include a little more description over the actual emotions of your characters. Since yours is a character-driven storyline, it’s super important that the reader forms a connection with your cast, and while I genuinely believe that you already have the makings of such a connection, some additional imagery would definitely solidify it.

Let me know when you pick up your review so I can subscribe to your story, and if you ever need an objective opinion, don’t hesitate to shoot me a message! I’d be happy to help.