I feel like I'm torn between two parts of the book. For the first 5 chapters I genuinely love it and have no problem giving it all-5-stars, but then the whole book progressed into a quite strange direction and it feels like wearing a ill-fitting suit, and like I said in my review swap thread, I'm very much a picky readers who are accustomed to high-quality, classic literature, not web-novel stuff, thus the current rating, unfortunately :(
I guess the problem is that the writing style of the author is too distinctively light, cheerful and bouncing, and very fast-paced, so it is a perfect match for the first five chapters, where the story appears to be a classic modern romance comedy. In this part, the thoughts and emotions about marriage and relationship of a 30-year-old Filipino single woman are vividly portraited, and it greatly resonates with the readers, especially for asian girls like me :D. Whereas for women in western countries it might be harder to understand the huge pressure of late marriage, the nervousness and doubts before dating online should still be able to be felt by everyone. The characters, especially MC, are adorable in these five chapters, and everything is funny but also realistic, too. I actually had the exact same experience like MC (though I'm just a college student right now), probably except for the part of sexyness (I'm more of a hard-to-get cold beauty on the surface, according to the friend who started my Tinder account without my consent), so I couldn't help laughing while reading this.
But then the author chose to continue it in a tough, dramatic style, steering it towards tragedies/accidents/hardships, and trying to let MC become a strong, tough female lead. It's not a bad turn, if you turn your writing style into the same direction, too, but the author didn't, or failed at trying, and all the merits of her writing style I mentioned in the last paragraph became setbacks. For a tragic or difficult experience to be touching in a novel, you have to spend lots of words portraiting characters and narrating details, so that readers could fully resonate with the plots and feel what the characters feel. Instead, the author pushed the story forward in the same fashion as before, thus lacking lots of proper detail writing, progressing the story too quickly, and leaving the characters very empty--almost to a ridiculous degree, like Kevin. Though I understand in the whole outline of the story Kevin is objectively pretty much just a tool to get MC into Belgium legally and give her the house and money, but YOU CAN'T SERIOUSLY JUST DEPICT HIM THAT WAY IN THE TEXTS. To me, he just appeared so conveniently and died so conveniently, without enough flesh-out of his character and explanations of his motives. It's pretty cold-blooded, tbh.
So my suggestions are two: the first one, also the most recommended one, is to go back to the original romance comedy style, e.g.write about all types of people MC met in online dates and the funny stuff happened in the process, because I think this is the kind of story that fits the author's writing style best; the second, if the author is determined to write a conventional romance drama, then you have to practice and improve your writing.
Don't get frustrated (since you post it in my thread so I presume you are ready to stand critics) about this, it cannot be more common to make these mistakes if you are a beginner (I think so since it's your 1st novel here), especially when you are not writing in your mother language. Just read more and practice, and you will do better XD.
