I’m on chapter 40 now just reading like a regular reader because the writing style is very easy to read but also softly poignant. Your story is a prime example of a story written very well in first person narrative. You took it and really ran with its strengths of engaging inner dialogue and compelling emotion. Note, engaging doesn’t mean speaking casually directly to the reader as if addressing them directly. It’s engaging as in it wordlessly invites the reader in with the speaker as a personal storyteller.
Honestly, I have no significant critiques or advice to speak of. Sure, I have some minor things, but those are in a different realm beyond Webnovel. As this story currently stands, it’s very readable for mobile reading and serial publishing. My minor stuff would be how to bring this into the next level of say, published books. Basically, to amend your content into a more traditional literature style. I really see no reason to judge based on this standard or convey those minor remarks as this current style is perfect for Webnovel. It’s high quality to the appropriate audience. Any changes otherwise would impact optimal reader targeting. Essentially, I’m skipping over this because that would dive into me mentoring on the fine details to polish a book. I just doing reviews.*
To make this short, I see this as worthy original to be seen and read by more people. At first, I thought your close to 1 million views was good, but now I think it deserves more recognition simply because you don’t often see the philosophical-psychological side of characters’ thoughts and emotions. I personally enjoyed this, and it also gives the character great depth that no background story could achieve alone.
With that said, sometimes Rosa, aka this writing style, gets very close to being too much of it (inward monologue) and not enough story. But she has a distinctive voice that is both relatable and likable, so this subtle issue doesn’t pose any real problems.
Possibly the only time where it did bore me slightly was the process of making soap. But that wasn’t even inner monologue as much as a lot of details that some readers might not care about. Though, I did find it interesting, it leaned towards being an info dump chapter of how to make soap, which is somewhat quirky and comical in its own way lol. However, to be very picky, it did disrupt the consistent flow of all the previous and following chapters.
The only other thing to note is the confusion of the MC’s lives, memories, and identities. I saw other readers had similar questions even well into the story, far from the beginning. Did she live as Rosa before or no? She just retained Rosa’s memories when reborn as a baby? You might want to clarify this if your ever rewrite. And it won’t mess with all the nice identity crisis she goes though. This is just for the reader so that they don’t wrinkle their brows in “wait—“.
Also, I saw this was under a contest for female lead development. To be picky, until the question above is clarified, I can’t quite regard her as “developing” because those are memories of another person. This is a bit of a gray area though as the two identities meld.
The only tick I took off was one star on writing quality, only because it’s written in an easy to read style with generally limited range of descriptive vocabulary. Again, remember 4=Above Average. Great would be a few nudges over into something that more resembles traditional literature style writing. Usually, you can achieve this better with third person because with first person, inner thoughts aren’t always worded eloquently but casually. Lastly, just proofreading is needed. Every chapter has small typos like missing periods or commas, nothing breaks the reading flow significantly.
To wrap, this is a well done web novel. The advice I offer is mainly for if I see clear problems in a story, like common pitfalls and new writer traps. This is a solid story, so my notes are all very small.
Awesome job!