Before Reading: I see a lot of semi-conflicting story tags, which sets off a few alarm bells in my head. The summary is somewhat repetitive and wordy too, so I’m not quite sure what to expect from this story. The premise seems pretty original, though, which is always a nice change of pace.

Plot: The Apple family is swimming in debt and Filthy Rich wants to capitalize on the opportunity. Instead of the first hundred jars of zap apple jam this year, he wants more. Unfortunately, because of that debt, Granny Smith is forced to comply with his demands.

However, she doesn’t want her grandchildren know about their financial struggles. For the kids' part, they know that she’s hiding information from them, and they want answers. When they press her for facts, she gets strangely defensive and holes herself up in her room. The tears start flowing, and she instinctively takes out her titular private scrapbook—a scrapbook filled with “scandalous history, mixed memories, family secrets, and a whole host of deep regrets.”

Predictably, the grandchildren come upstairs to see what’s wrong. After some back-and-forth, she lets up and agrees to tells them about the Apple family's history in Ponyville.

All things considered, the plot is definitely one of the strong points of this story. It's believable and compelling, which is something many authors struggle with. The first few chapters make logical sense without bogging down the narrative in too much exposition, and they kept me interested. I can safely say that I plan to read more of the story once I have the proper time to do so.

Characters: While the plot was the strong point of the story, the characters were definitely the weak point. At least in the first portion of the story, they came off as bland and mechanical. Despite knowing what they've been through, I couldn't really connect with Granny Smith or the Apple siblings.

This could be remedied by adding in some action tags to show the characters' emotions more. The more we are shown, the more we have to connect with. Let the readers know what the characters are feeling—often times, dialogue alone isn't enough.

Execution: The technical aspects of the writing leave room to be desired as well. Here are a few of the errors I noticed while reading:

• Words that needed to be hyphenated weren't.
• Several characters had dialogue in the same paragraph.
• Pointless adjectives were scattered throughout.
• There were a handful of typos and grammar errors.
• There were some borderline wall-of-text paragraphs.
• The accents were a little overbearing.
• The southern accent bled into Filthy's dialogue and the narrative occasionally.

Really, a good sweep by a proofreader or two would do wonders for the story.

After Reading: This story is something of an anomaly to me. The errors present throughout would have been at the very least semi-crippling any other story, but... for this one, to put it simply, they just weren't.

After thinking about it for awhile, I think I've pinned down why that is—

—it's because of the author. You can tell how extremely proud Cadabra is of this story, and that it was just as much of a journey for him or her as it was for Granny Smith and her grandchildren. It's abundantly clear that they had fun while writing the story, which makes me even happier while reading it.

That's something a lot of writers forget. Be proud of your work, and, at the end of the day, you're only obligated to make yourself happy. This story is a prime example of how to do that right.

For this reason alone, I would recommend this story to anyone who can overlook a handful of little errors. I promise that it'll be worth your time in the end.

3431528

I genuinely appreciate your feedback. This has been a very fun story for me to write, and any feedback is always worth it to me. With that being said, could you recommend a good proof reader? I know this story is massive, so that makes it hard for someone who has little time.

3432289 There are plenty of groups out there for that exact purpose like The Proofreader Group or Looking for Editors, but since your story is already pretty long, I'd probably recommend either Overly Extensive Editors or Writers and Reviewers Institute for Technical Excellence.