I sent The Last Descendant of Eve off to the 21st Annual Writer's Digest Self Published Book Awards a few months back and although I didn't win a place, the review I received was pleasing.
Books were evaluated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 meaning "needs improvement" and 5 meaning "outstanding". The scale was strictly to provide a point of view reference, it was not a cumulative and did not reflect ranking. These were my scores Structure and Organisation 4 Grammar 3 Production Quality and Cover Design 4 Plot 4 Character Development 4 Here was the judges commentary: I thought this story was very successful. Evie was a great protaganist and very clearly fit the YA mold. The mystery was very compelling. The opening line, which is your first chance to impress us, was wonderful. The writing was really good, but did have some grammatical issues. Destinys should be destinies. There was some misuse of semi-colons. The use of apostrophes, too, wasn't always correct and there were some issues with preposition choices. However, there was a good flow to the dialogue and I liked the fact that you weren't afraid to leave off dialgue tags and trust your reader to understand who was speaking. Jada, Zach, Evie and Sully were all excellent characters. There was a great creepy, mysterious vibe that I found very commercial. The idea of the beads reflected the tasks/virtues Evie had to complete was really interesting and nothing I'd seen before. I did think that having Evie in Eden might have been a bit much. It's already a stretch to believe the modern Adam and Eve end up together without that detail. The cover was very chilling and showed an excellent branding and attention to detail. My one criticism is that the vibe was a little too horror-like when the story was really more of a contemporary with paranormal elements. However, I did think this was a commercial, well-executed story overall.
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AuthorLorraine Eljuga Archives
January 2020
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