Touch

Anger. Fear. Happines. Excitement. Desperation. Europhia. Disgust. Awe. 

All the emotions i felt while reading Touch, broken down to eight words. And they can't even begin to express how much i loved this read. How much the characters matter to me. How real they feel. How...amazing this story is. 

I'm not going to blab on too much here, just get down to the nity gritty. 

Story:

Touch tells the story on three young adults in the modern day world with superpowers. Seen this before? Well, think again. There are no superheros or supervillians here, at all. Powers are hidden from the world, any evidence of their passing carefully written over by the well aware governments of the world. 

These powers are only manifest through trauma and stress, meaning that more often than not, those that recieve them are not the friendliest of people. james, our primary MC, recieves his after being raped. Sounds disurbing? Well, it damn well should be. Rhytmn doesn't gloss any details over, realistically portraying Trauma and it's effects on the human psyche. I won't go and spoil the other characters, but all of them have had horrible things happen to them in the past, and this makes them so much more interesting then many of the blatantly fake 'revenge MC's" you see by the dozen on RRL. This isn't some event that happened and turns the MC into a ruthless killing machine, this is horrors happening to children, events that scar them for life. 

This might turn off somereaders who want generic power creep MCs or glorify this, but i appluad Rhythm for the the way they portrayed this. RRL needs more stories that research this sort of stuff as much as you do. 

Style: 

Lets be honest. I like Rhytm's style and have absolutley no critique for it. The dialogue is presented well, the action flows much better than most stories i've read and the plot moves at just the right pace. Everything just clicked for me when reading this. A story, no matter how epic or emotional it might seem, is nothing without a good writer to convey it, and Rhythm doesn that beautifully. 

Grammar:

Again, the grammar in Touch is FLAWLESS. Nuff said. Either Rhythm is the God of Grammar or it has an entire editing team on standby. Don't know which one is sacrier to me. 

Characters: ( WIP Will expand this later. )

I'm not going to mince words, Touch's cast is amazing. Small at first, but steadily growing. Spread out and varied, it's downrigh amazing. 

10/10

Conclusion:

 A challenging read, one that constantly asks you if you have the balls to turn the page, or just run back to your normal weebo reads. But is it worth it? Five hundred pages in, and i say YES. 

Touch was worth every page, every minute i spent reading it. And i WILL be back for more. 

This story is the best on RoyalRoadl. The realistic reactions and emotions, are of a far higher quality than any others on here, and even the works of formally published authors. I cannot wait for more, my favourite character as of now is most definitely Tasha...She is, seemingly the muse for all displays of sassiness, crude-but-lovable and lighthearted even in the worst of situation characters. Her issues are...different than the others, but no less serious...though how well she's handling her living situation leads me to believe there is another issue that caused her powers to awaken. if that is true, my heart will undoubtly shatter into nonillions of pieces. This story is wonderful, and I hope you the best Rythminthemind.

It's weird that this story is here in RRL, it really shouldn't be. The quality of this story goes far beyond anything posted on the site (apart from the top 5). So If you're looking for a legit book about the lives of people with superpowers (with the nitty gritty details, no gary sues showcasing 100% positivity and good) then this is the novel for you. Everything seems to have been planned for and is interconnected. The characters have depth and we might actually got some sort of plot later on. Thnx for the read, Author.

The stuff the characters are going through are real life things that actually happen and despite this being fiction what with the superpowers they have actual responses a'real' person would have the plot is great and the writing amazing not to mention that the characters themselves are well developed with plenty of though put into them

in a lot of stories, I'll gravitate to one character and be frustrated when the pov changes... 
but in this novel, I've actually found every single character compelling in some way~
they all seem to be like actual people, instead of just caricatures of evil/good to further a plot~  

Although this story has a lot of mature themes, it isn't gratuitous and doesn't continually step on the main characters in order to invoke pitty. it starts off with tramatic events, and they are handled really well, but the plot also has many magical/vigilante arcs which are really fun~ It also holds a lot more tension than usual because, unlike other stories, the main characters can and do fail.

The logistics of this world are very well done too. Unlike most modern magic/superhero stories, there isn't the darker undertone of someone inexplicably going out of their way to make characters' lives terrible for no apparent reason. Motivations and plot points make sense for the characters and nearly all of them are redeemable and sympathetic. and those that aren't, at least think they are.

Overall, the story is very exciting and is easily one of my favorite novels on this site~

First things first, Touch is not a story for everyone. It handles its subjects tactfully, but even so, this is a story which is fundamentally about troubled children and painful emotion. I don't see that going away.

I'll be honest and state straight out that this isn't my kind of story. It's a bit of a slow trek, with prolonged descriptions of the minutea of emotions and motives of its characters. That's not necessarily a bad or a good thing, but it is something to be aware of if you're looking for a quicker story. Heavy detail and a slow(ish, but measured) pace seems to be the writer's style.

That said, what it does, it does well. The writing is very technically solid. The characters and dialogue are genuine, even in their awkwardness. Nothing is 'prettied up' for the sake of the reader. There was a brief conversation between a husband and wife which made me cringe, until I realized it was an honest representation of a real pair of cringe-worthy parents. Touch can definitely boast of very genuine and 3-dimensional characters, all of which are easy to empathize with.

The writer begins early laying the framework for larger plotlines later, and there are enough glimpses of strangeness to keep intrigue high from start straight on through. There are strange and interesting things going on in Touch's otherwise seemingly normal world of car rides, schoolyards, and bedrooms.

STRENGTHS: Well written from a technical standpoint. The pacing is slow, but consistent, and it handles many perspective changes smoothly. From the first chapter, the plot leads towards interesting reveals, and the writer knows how to sprinkle questions and answers both to keep that rolling with a good pace of escalation. If this is your genre, it's quality writing and story-telling.

WEAKNESSES: Even taking the slow pace into account, scenes can linger for too long on occasion. Excessive detail can be given in explanation where hints or implications might carry more weight. This does get better as the story progresses, though.

CONCLUSION: Touch is an emotional drama set against a backdrop of super-human powers and mystery. It's very difficult to ascribe strengths and weaknesses to it because of how strongly preference factors into enjoyment. The story is slow going, the descriptions long and detailed, the content fairly unsettling. But the characters have soul, and the mystery is definitely there. For some people, that may be exactly what they're looking for. But for others, perhaps not their style.

If you're looking for quick action or grand adventure, this isn't the place. But if you're looking for honest, emotionally driven drama with a healthy splash of intrigue and strange powers, give Touch a look.

Touch is very solid serial and one of the better you'll find on RRL. The writing is solid, easily some of the higher on this site. There are some minor issues with style (fairly frequent usage of ‘the boy [said]’ or ‘the girl [said]’, which can feel very alienating and dehumanizing) but the flow is generally good. It is slow but it doesn’t feel like it is dragging.

The children feel like children. Perhaps not perfectly, there are times where they slip into sounding a bit too much like adults, but better than I expected. I won’t lie—when I read the info on this page, I was initially fairly hesitant. But Rhythm does quite well with them, so, props are in order.

I did not note many grammar or spelling issues but there are more of the former than the latter (minor things like capitalization, rogue quotation marks mostly). There are some minor things I’d do differently, typically to render over-complexity down to simplicity, turn some big meandering paragraphs into multiple smaller ones, but it didn’t take me out of the reading.

One thing I think Touch does really well is how the chapters begin and end. Personally, I rate this as one of the more important parts of writing: strong endings and strong beginnings, both in general and chapter-by-chapter.

I feel the perspective changes mid-chapter aren’t ideal, particularly when they happen more than once. This is pretty subjective, however. Similarly, I thought especially that the Name: headers for each change were unnecessary.

Beyond that, if there’s one thing that stuck out to me as an issue, is that I don’t feel like I had a good idea of the world. I feel like, as a reader, I don’t know what the average person knows and that my expectations are somehow in a state of total flux but constantly being pulled out from under me.

All in all, Touch surprised me. That’s what I remember most about it, how it surprised me with its quality and how it handled its subject matter with care.

I recommend Touch, if you can handle the subject matter.

I enjoyed the story overall. It was definitely a slow start, but the later chapters were more intriguing once the plot got rolling. I like the author's exploration of superpowers in ordinary people, and a lot of the minor details about the inner workings of the powers made my nerdy side giddy. I like Tasha so far. I think she's a well fleshed-out character with fun dialogue and a lot of agency. The rest I don't connect with so much. It seems like a lot of them mill around without much direction to them. Some of the prose was a bit hard to read. Especially the fight scenes made my head spin. I'd say it's still pretty good in terms of web fiction, I've seen far worse out there. Some of the dialogue made me wince, but there were some really sweet lines in there, also. Overall, good job. Thanks for a nice read, Rhythm. I'll be looking to pick this back up once you've updated with a few more chapters.

Totally different from anything you will find on RRL. Interesting take on heros and their dark origins story. Forsure would recommend this story to anyone that enjoys good characters and are okay with dark topics.