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Review #4142838
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Review by Shaye
In affiliation with SIMPLY POSITIVE GROUP  
Rated: | (3.5)
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Hi jimghall,

I am Lorraine and I am reviewing your piece "Invalid Item"  today in affiliation with "Simply Positive Review Forum "  and as a judge for "Invalid Item" .

Title: Upon reading the title, I was definitely curious where you'd chosen to take this story. The title did its job and drew me into the story.

First Impression: You've got a good plot here. The actual storyline I enjoyed, where this piece fell down was in the technical side and sentence structure.

Plot: As I said, I enjoyed the story itself. The idea of introducing the friendly face for Joanie in Glenda and then having Glenda be the one that ultimately betrays her helped introduce an unexpected twist into the story. You've got a good structure here, with an introduction, showing your main character and the situation she is in. Next, you have a good building, and I'm wondering where you're going with this, which encourages me to continue on. Finally, you've got a roundabout link to the beginning. Judge Randall.

Characterisation: Poor Joanie's had a tough life and it doesn't look like it's getting any better. The character of Glenda was good. The reader just began trusting Glenda as a friendly character, before she led Joanie to "Judge Randall's private dungeon." Wow, what an evil character. Does she get something out of helping, I wonder? The thing I missed here was description. I have no idea what any of the characters look like. Hair colour, eye colour, age etc. If I can't really get an idea of the characters, I can't find them as relatable as I could if I knew what they looked like, and could picture them clearly in my head.

Prompt: You took the prompt in an interesting, unique direction that I thoroughly enjoyed. I can see the relation to the prompt and you've followed it well. *Thumbsup*

Spelling/Grammar: This area is where the most improvement is required, in my opinion.
"When the door opened, they filed through. When" - This sentence and the start of the next one is an example of repetitive sentence starts. Try and vary the words you start the sentence with. I noticed a few "then", "when", "the".

Another thing, you don't need "he said", "she said", "Glenda said" after every bit of speech. Often, nothing is required, but if you feel it isn't clear who is speaking, you can have the character doing an action, which introduces some life to the character, but doesn't have the repetitive speech tags. A very key example of this is, ""Why would I need protection,” Joanie asked." - Here, you haven't got a question mark, which is necessary. And since you need the question mark, it's pointless to have "Joanie asked" on the end it.

This is only a small thing, but you say "heartbeats", which I hesitated over, as I wondered if she had more than one heartbeat.

Closing Thoughts: This is a good story idea, and I'd love to see it improved, so I could make the star rating a little higher! I hope my comments are helpful to you, but its you writing style and I'd never dream of trying to change that. Write on! *Smile*

Lorraine

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Listen, smile, agree, and then do whatever you were going to do anyway! Robert Downey Jr.


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   *CheckG* You responded to this review 08/02/2015 @ 10:17am EDT
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