57/100 crazyasianlady - Here To Spy

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Here To Spy
written by crazyasianlady
reviewed by Amber_Sica

 

Title: 5/10
Here To Spy. It's an interesting title, to be sure, but it also gives away what your story is to be about. It makes it obvious that your main character is a spy who will fall in love with her target and then be caught out as a spy. Naming it something more unique, something that gives less away about the plot, will help a lot. 
Also! Never capitalize 'To' when it is marking an infinitive (to play, to run, to spy). Your story title should be written as 'Here to Spy'.

 

Plot: 12/35

                1/5: Originality
                The idea of a teen spy being sent to infiltrate something is quite common here on AFF. The one original point I will give your story is that you have a unique reasoning behind the idea (the Pledis Enigma thing). However...

                2/10: Believability
                A teen spy?? No. That is completed and utterly ridiculous. I don't care that the Alex Rider series was popular, it was inplausible. A teen would never be a spy for an agency, that simple. Making your lead character to be someone recruited out of high school, while in university, would be so much better! It's well-known that people can often pass for someone younger than they actually are, so having your lead character be years old would help your storyline out a LOT. Otherwise, it's completely unbelievable and cliche.

                5/10: Narration
                I absolutely hate first person narrative. It holds your story back from being what it could be and instead pins it into the little box of having to filter everything through one character's thoughts. You have a nice writer's voice, I would just advise you strongly to write instead in thrid person narrative. I think you could go so much further with this story and with your future writings, as well, if you leave first person POV far behind. As it is, your 'voice' is stunted into one little box.

                4/10: Setting
                Make sure to describe your surrounding better. It is harder to do this in first person POV than if you were writing in thrid person, but it is necessary for your story to really come to life. You rely a lot of dialogue to tell the reader what is going on, while you should be relying on a mix of desrciption and dialogue. For instance, the scene on the bus. The only reason we as readers know they are on the bus is because you mentioned that they were standing in line for it. Adding in little things (i.e. the way the seat feels, the view out the window, how Seth is leaning his arms on the back of her seat, etc) will help to make your story more viewable to the reader's mind and therefore much more 'real' feeling.

 

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Amalya
#1
Chapter 22: After finally finishing writing It Begins With Blood (still posting the last couple chapters), I decided to revisit the previous review. It still has just as much impact now as it did then, if not more so. There are certainly many things I could go back and change to make it more accessible to readers and more pertinent to the tags specifically listed. As I got to the end, it definitely felt even harder to juggle the people I'd introduced and to make sure they all had some sort of resolution. To the point that I'm not sure I succeeded even half as well as I intended. But I do know that with the sound critique given, the access to the polls taken, and the suggestions made in regards to how I can make it better, this is certainly a project I would like to put under the microscope again at a later point in time. Perhaps when it's not so fresh (now) and it's had a chance to settle. Writing 'The End' is always hard with any extensive piece of work and this one was no different. But I do feel I can make it better and give it a stronger direction and purpose in the future. To that end, I wanted to thank Amber_Sica again and especially you Librarian for keeping the reviews in an easily accessible archive for later perusal. It's incredibly helpful and I will be coming back to it in the future. Cheers!