Reviewer: MissRut

Review on;

THE SKULLS

Thank you Asuna_486 for your trust.

The Cover: The cover does it’s work of letting readers in on the center of the story and keeping things hushed enough for killing curiosity to propel what angle this is going to blow up from, not to mention it is extremely creative. The contrast of roses with a skull mask in red and black is very much eye catching. 5 points.

The Title: It works well with the cover no doubt and it narrows down a reader’s imagination to focus on the sole element that the entire book solely revolves around; skulls. 5 points.

The Blurb: the idea of a story blurb is both to give a sneak peek into the real thing while keeping readers guessing how the real thing actually looks. It could be expository or mysterious but what is important is to keep the audience completely hooked. While the general idea of this particular story’s blurb is particularly relatable, the way it’s written may or may not put off a reader at that point. The thing about creating a blurb centered around mafia, gangs, paranormal beings or any book with such related themes is to ensure one hasn’t already lost the interest of anyone yet to settle down to find out the contents of said book. The blurb has unbridgeable loopholes that are capable of killing one’s interest. It stands to be a stereotypical judge of the quality of virtually any book in existence. There is room for improvement however; a few edits with word choice and sentence structure should do the trick. 3 points.

The Setting: The main part of the story starts out in England. There is a lot of travelling and sorts but basically it deals with the big cities. It’s fine for twenty-first century drama if anything else and the children school there. It’s a cool setting. Definitely relatable to a point. 12 points.

The Plot: The story plot is altogether quite unclear. There’s a gang with a seemingly heartless girl as head who is clearly living a double life, a club, hormonal teens, blood, a questionable crush on a quad’s best friend and a lot of tangles in general but it eventually points to love or ruthlessness in the end sort of. All in all, the story line exists but it isn’t easy to tell where it is pointing at least until about the fifth chapter. It’s hard to get a bearing in the beginning but things straighten further into the book. For sure it’s not one of the usual ones and overall it just depicts the bond in family but in a twisted way. 3 points.

The Characters: There are the quads, their parents too. Basically, the family is in charge of all gang operations and are close knit. Alexia, firstborn of the four, leading multiple lives very well, is the boss of things. The other three are Alexander, Aria and Maria. None like being left out of any action in any form. Ryder and Liam are the most loyal aides that hang around at all times. Apparently, they are part of the family in their own way so is Rachael. They work well together, apparently can’t do without each other. They’re tough and have hearts only for those considered as family and pretty much dispose of any others regardless. However, their inability to be independent of each other could be viewed through lenses of immaturity. I recommend they all grow spines somewhat. Their personalities are fine but their reasoning seems far below them and even the way they operate. There isn’t enough smokescreen on their identities either so there goes the mysterious aura. 3 points.

The Content: There’s a fair share of drama and action throughout the book as well as pinches of heartwarming moments here and there. The only somewhat noticeable hiccup is the order of the narrative. There are so many happenings just being rushed along till the end. That in all makes it cringe-worthy. It seems there wasn’t enough premeditation on how to arrange the overall story and that greatly affected the plot, hence the loopholes. It can turn out alright if there is enough time devoted to molding the overall writing and actually make the scenes work hand in hand to form the book and not existing apart from each other. At some points, the scenes were a bit too drab. There are also some unrealistic happenings that neither agree with the narrative, the characters or even the plot.  14 points.

Writing Style: The author’s writing style is one that carries readers along. There is a little too much of switching between points of view and that contributes to making the narrative kind of boring especially as many as three switches within a chapter at close intervals. The aim is obviously to keep the entire audience in the loop of everything going on but one can only do so much if one explains every single detail with too much individuality. It seems to be more of rushed work. Along with the frequent repetitions, poor description of actions, reactions and interactions, there are some places that need to be checked for appropriate use of punctuation. That alone could change the meaning of a sentence. The romantic scenes won’t work with the same style of writing. 6 points.

Grammar, Vocabulary& Sentence Structure: This is one other area that can have the audience flinching. For one there isn’t the use of possessive pronouns per switch in point of view, for example; ‘Alexia P.o.V’, instead of, ‘Alexia’s P.o.V’. That’s a major turn off and even if ignored, one can’t deny the overuse of the word ‘smirking’ and ‘torture’. The articles ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ were also not used appropriately. In addition, adverbs were misused a lot. There’s lacking info on how gangs actually work and their terminologies are more or less absent. Words like ‘were’ and ‘was’ are used inappropriately as well. These minor mistakes occurred far too many times to be overlooked and are another huge turn off. They can cut off interest in the book altogether. 13 points.

Engagement with Readers: If the target audience is more or less on the mature side then it would be very easy to lose them at some point. Far too many factors don’t agree with the story itself but if the target audience happens to be those not so experienced in these kind of themes then it’s easier to hold on to them but even so, the errors would still be a dampener and instead of enjoying the book they might just want to speed up to see how it ends. The book ends up looking much better in one’s head if one sticks around long enough to finish it. 11 points.

Total points; 75/100