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All I Wanna Do

by Bella (link)

Genre het, romance, drama/angst
Pairings Isaac/OFC, Taylor/OFC
Length 17 chapters and epilogue
Status Completed

A good prologue is difficult to write. The first chapter of All I Wanna Do, which is full of angst and suspense, would be better described as a prologue, but it still isn’t that strong. Perhaps because the focal character is reflecting on the past, Bella’s writing waivers between tenses and never fully settles on one. It isn’t the most promising beginning I’ve read.

From there, it doesn’t improve much. The chapters switch from one first person narrator to another, but their voices aren’t distinguishable at all. The lack of proper paragraph formatting and constant compound sentences that verge on run-ons give the story a breathless feeling that isn’t a good thing at all. If done well, it could add to the suspense, but all it does is leave me feeling dizzy. The fact that the chapters tend to overlap a bit and rehash the same scene from different character’s perspectives doesn’t help me focus, either, and it makes such short chapters seem even shorter since they contain little new information.

Bella almost seems to have two different plots happening here. One is the surface one, where characters do something really stupid with disastrous results. Because it’s so random, I can’t really feel bad for them, nor can I feel bad when everyone involved continues to say and do dumb things just because it’s convenient for the plot. The other plot, the one that actually interests me involves the fact that the band has ended and Isaac has moved to Australia. He claims to have a good relationship with his brother, yet he took some pretty drastic measures to put distance between them. I would have liked to have seen that idea explored some more, though perhaps by a different author.

Ultimately, Bella took what could have been a somewhat interesting plot, in a soap opera sort of way, and wrote it in a way that makes it pretty difficult to connect to. Add in the fact that it’s obvious she also wrote All I Wanna Do as an original story and didn’t fix all of her changes before posting it as hanfic, and there’s really very little here to recommend.

Review by Bethany (website)