The Underground Circle by christyyyy13

Reviewed by caramelmushrooms

*** sorry about the lack of paragraph indentations - it is irking me quite a lot, but formatting isn't cooperating with me at the moment. 

Thanks for understanding ^^

Title [5/5]

I loved your title. It’s concise, it’s not transparent in meaning and consequently interesting, and more than anything, it’s very relevant to your story.

Foreward [8/10]

The foreward itself wasn’t used as effectively as I think you could have used it. It did show - not tell - the main characters, which you made quite clear as you listed them off. However, other than the brief description which you gave them, there wasn’t anything completely captivating or evoking a noticeable response.

Despite this, I want to commend you because you were concise - yet again - and the content was enough to keep the momentum from your title going.

Plot [17/20]

I definitely appreciate the plot. The type of story this is may seem typical - lots of authors choose to write action based stories - but you set up the story with a lot of underlying connections, and you decided to set it up on school. It was a fusion of sorts between school romance and hardcore actions, and it’s good because it has the potential of interesting a spectrum of people.

              I do have high hopes that this won't fall into a cliche of some sort, just because I can see it potentially slipping into a very obvious story line. However, I trust that you'll be able to keep from doing so, just because you have these pinches of originality in there already. 

Character Development [11/15]

I cannot delve deeply into this category because the story isn’t completely developed yet - I only read up to Chapter 11, and the majority of the beginning chapters I read were just introductory information - the characters are not radically different than they were in chapter 1 at this point. What I decided to do is to still give you a score in this category, but I’ll be looking more into “potential” instead.

I do think that your characters have lots of areas for potential growth. I think the most obvious would have to be Mark, since he’s already faced with the dilemma of betraying the circle he is a part of or following the instinct which he faces, telling him that Mina is a good person. I also think that the contrast between Mark and JB will work nicely in playing with Mina’s change. You did focus heavily on characterization and character change, and I appreciate that.

One thing I would recommend, however, is that the possible changes are slightly obvious. In other words, by bluntly describing the innermost thoughts of your characters early on (ie. Mark’s dilemma), there’s less suspense to what might happen, or what your characters are thinking, etc. It could be more pulling to some to try keeping parts of it hidden, but I think being blatant about certain details is just your writing style, not a flaw. .

Flow/Style [16/20]

For the most part, the sentence structures and flow are pretty basic.The syntax varies, but not by much. If you did a bit more to have a wider range of types of sentences or structures in your writing, I your story would be a lot more captivating - the readers would have surprises in something more than just your plot.

  One thing I do feel which may potentially take away from your flow is your grammar. I’ll touch upon more in the grammar section directly, but, while your grammar was for the most part correct, there were instances where it was noticeably incorrect, which for me anyway broke the flow of my reading.

Lastly, you do a lot more telling than showing. In other words, a lot of the material covered and information given to the readers is told to them - either by dialogue or just plainly narrated - and this my take away from the reader’s engaging in the story to try to figure out the hazy uncertainties of the story. At this point, I’m being slightly nit-picky, but I’m honestly just letting you know because I do think you have a great start and wish you the best in writing, so that more people will read you very interesting story.

Grammar [15/20]

The grammar, as I have mentioned before, is not completely lacking and there are only occasional mistakes. The reason why I took off so many points, however, is that that, despite not being flooded with grammatical mistakes, there were still some there, and there were even a couple which were very noticeably existent in your writing, even when I wasn’t scrutinizing your work to look for hidden mistakes. In the very least you may want to fix the larger mistakes, as it is possible for many to just skip by author’s small mistakes.
 

Ie. “10 years has passed and you’re still the same boy back then! Still impatient. Well, want to get out of this life? I know you want to escape so bad.”

• Plural verbs (10 years have passed)

• Missing conjunctions (still the same boy as back then)

• Adverb -ly (escape badly)

• “Want to get out of this life” also doesn’t flow very well with your overall style of writing. Maybe the change was intentional, to characterize the boss, but I did catch my eye.
   

I’ll just specify this one example because I think it captures the essence of your grammatical mistakes. They’re individually not terrible - it’s quite good. However, when there are so many mistakes all together, and in the first chapter, it does multiple things.

1. It’s easier for non-scrutinizing readers to catch on to the mistakes, just because there are so many of them together

2. If you make lots of mistakes early on, readers will get the impression that this is how the writing will be for the whole story. This means that they will anticipate mistakes, and therefore be more likely to pick up on even the smaller ones as they come up later on.
    

I know I wrote lots of comments here, but it’s honestly because I think the grammar touch up is 1- easily fixable and 2- will bring a lot more to your story. It’s not bad, I just wanted to help you improve your story and plus, I’m a bit of a grammar-nazi in general.

Enjoyment [8/10]

Bad grammar is a pet peeve of mine, so I’ll have to admit it broke my flow whenever I was reading it, even when I reread and did not scrutinize your writing. However, I think your story is one that has lots of potential for not only plot twists but character growth, and I’m curious to see where you’ll take it. :)

Total [80/100]

Comment: Thank you for requesting at #1704!

Reviewer's note: I think that the story truly does have potential. I've mentioned multiple times, but it's slightly difficult to review a story which hasn't progressed

much, and there are some bumps, but overall you're holding up pretty well. If you have any questions, you know where to dm me :)

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