Alone

Reviewer: dhaatk
Review for: inspiritxbaby

Requested on: 12/31/2014
Finished On: 01/01/2015

NOTE: One-Shot (Spoiler Alert)

(4/10) Title: The title is not original at all, a lifetime would not be enough to count all pieces of art that carry such name. Yet, the word you chose relates to the story itself. To make the title better, I would change it to something more artistic, for example, “Dumping the Loneliness”. Such word play would imply that you will focus on a character, that experiences solitude for a long time, but in the end succeeds in becoming happy.

(8/10) Character: Most characters were written well, but a little bit lacking. What I liked the most, was Chaerin and Taehyung's first encounter. As a reader I was able to see how and why the girl was so devastated that she chose to end her life, her reaction, even if hasty, was as natural as the guy's actions, when he saw a person, who's about to commit suicide. Behaviour of them both was very realistic. Moving on to the main antagonist of the story, I think you should have expanded more on Jessica's hatred towards Chaerin and basically that was the biggest flaw of the story, what concerns characters. I could comprehend Jessica's harsh reaction, when she found out that Chaerin was close with Taehyung, her ex-boyfriend, that she wanted back, but I couldn't understand why she hated the protagonist so much in the first place. You should have given more attention to the event in Jessica's life, that caused her to have such urge to hurt Chaerin.

(7/10) Originality: I've read and written so many stories long time ago like this, that I can't see it as original. What made your story stand out a bit, however, was how you didn't rush things too much. Chaerin and Taehyung spent a lot of time together before they got into a relationship or even shared their first kiss. This makes up a lot for the story, so that's why I'm giving that many points for originality.

(36/40) Storyline/Plot: Since the story itself was not too original, I'm not excluding points from plot on that. What caught my eye firstly, were the diary entries. It is a good mean to tell a story and you made it work, yet you could have used some graphics to make it more entertaining. Something like this:

Moving on from diary entries, I liked how, as story continued, you explained that for Taehyung to save Chaerin from the bridge was not only an instinct but he related to a suicidal person himself. What disturbed me the most, was probably the Chaerin's transfer to other school. Taehyung had no legal right to do all the paperwork, so what would have been more realistic for him to do, was to prupose Chaerin to change schools.

(20/25) Grammar/Errors: There were barely any morphology or spelling mistakes, but your syntax is a bit lacking. The sentence structure is lacking, I'll give some examples below along with the other mistakes:
“I'm afraid myself” – “I'm afraid of myself”;
“Chaerin looked up, finding herself a guy with brownish-blonde hair pulling her up” – “Chaerin looked up and found herself being pulled up by a guy with brownish-blonde hair”;
“Does suiciding help?” – I would change it to “Does committing suicide help?” or “Does killing yourself help?”, because “suiciding” is a rare word and usually can be detected as not valid.
“I don't want to be hurt like how Jessica has hurt me” – this is grammatically correct but a bit unclear by syntactic means, so I would suggest changing it like “I don't want to get hurt by someone I trust again. Jessica has done enough evil to me already”;
“for her 17 years of life” – “for 17 years of her life”;
“we're both gonna be late” – “we both are gonna be late”;
“more confidence as usual” – “more confidence than usually”;
“because of the pain both physically and emotionally” – “<...> physical and emotional”;
“me family” – “my family”;
“I have ever came across” – “I have ever seen” would be more suitable, but if not, then it should be “I have ever come across” at least;
“Chaerin heard a call that obviously meant for her attention” – “Chaerin heard a call that was obviously meant to get her attention”;
“I remembered warning her” – “I remember warning her”;
 “at Chaerin who on Taehyung's back” – “at Chaerin who was on Taehyung's back”;
“if you say if you love me” – “if you say that you love me”;

(4/5) Overall Enjoyment: All in all, the story wasn't bad but it wasn't perfect either. However, I believe if I had found the story myself, I would have carried on reading after first few sentences.

(79/100) Points Total

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