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 Review #4738167 |
 | Sam Adams and the leprechauns  [E] Sam Adams and the leprechauns  |
| (2.5)  HAPPY WDC ACCOUNT ANNIVERSARY FROM "Anniversary Reviews"   First Impressions: This reads more like an outline than the actual story. I think you have an interesting idea here - the old tale of that pot of gold has always been popular in fiction and myths - and it looks like you have given this story quite a bit of thought. In the first paragraph, you introduce the main character, Sam, whom you have given a little bit of backstory, and a friend with a bit more of a background, and they meet in a specific city and you have even named the bar - and then those details become irrelevant immediately. It seems a shame because as you mentioned them right at the beginning, I assumed that they would be important in the rest of the tale, but they weren’t. I think it would be worth fleshing out the whole story - tell the readers why it is important who the characters are, why they met in this place, and have those details influence their decisions and actions later on in the story. Otherwise, they could be anybody, but I assume to you it was important who they were, so you need to make the readers care about it as well.  Suggestions: I noticed that you didn’t set off the direct speech with the necessary speech marks. There are three instances where a character speaks, and each time, you need punctuation before the speech begins, and start and end it with speech marks. For example, in this line: The leprechaun laughed and said Welcome my friends. The entrance is that way. I would rewrite this like this: The leprechaun laughed and said, “Welcome my friends. The entrance is that way.” They laughed and went outside and found the deserted mine. In the previous few sentences, you used “they” to refer to the locals in the pub but here, you mean Sam and Maria. You should start a new paragraph here as the action shifts from one group of people to another, which helps the readers to understand who is doing what, but also, I would replace “They” with their names to avoid confusion. and put on a shamrock on their backpacks Just an unnecessary word here - I have underlined the duplicate above.  Final Thoughts: Like I said, I think you had an interesting idea here but the story needs to be fleshed out a lot more. I’m not saying that you should continue it after they entered the cave; in fact, I thought that the ending was nicely done, leaving the readers without telling them what exactly happened and why they were never seen again. But the events leading up to it need to be engaging enough so that the readers really care what happened to the characters and feel upset about the ending, or, if you want, that they feel the characters aren’t nice people and they deserve their fate, or any emotion you would like to evoke. As it is, there wasn’t enough character development for the readers to develop any kind of feeling for the characters and consequently, they didn’t care one way or another what happened to them. I believe it’s worth you giving this story another look to see if you can add some details and descriptions to it, let the characters display some emotions as they discuss the plan and go on their journey, give the leprechaun some internal monologue where he chuckles to himself at the silly humans who will surely soon perish - sorry, I’m getting carried away here but you get the idea. I think anything like that would help to make this a more rounded story.    My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 03/20/2024 @ 6:57pm EDT