the pink alpaca reviews

[2022] - XI

Ye Who Dare Not by _Zorbaz

What I loved: The whole premise of this story is something unique and it got my attention. I guess the world introduced is also good and engaging. The characters are also relatable and whole. The pacing is able to sustain my increasingly-short attention span, which is always worthy of praise. This story offers a solid adventure and action, for sure. It's an enjoyable read.

What didn't work: I guess most will be about the structural side of things. First point would be the character arcs. The POV characters introduced at the start of the story are presented to be as important but two of those characters do not have well-resolved or even well-developed arcs. That would be Damlin's and Addan's. The way things happened to these two is just rushed and lacked impact. I would have liked to have the story make use of them more because they're such dynamic characters with complete backstories, motivations, flaws, fears, and everything.

Second would be the villain. Sure, for the majority of the story, we have someone masquerading as the villain by destroying cities and stuff but in the latter half of the story, when the real villain is introduced, I guess it was kinda info-dumped and not executed properly. What should have been a great plot twist ended up being a source of confusion for me. This issue was what killed the luster of the ending, too.

Lastly, there are certain things with the worldbuilding and fantasy concepts that kind of got lost in translation along the way because of all the war and fighting. By the time the ending rolled around, it's like the book lost its timing in explaining the concept of Old Blood and all those stuff that it crammed into a flashback and what is basically an info dump.

What to improve: Def look into those points raised above. For character arcs, I guess I can say that don't let them have any POV at all if they won't have solid arcs in moving the story along. POV characters exist to not just move your story but to live through it with their own lives. Damlin's and Addan's POVs are some I would have liked to see resolved. If the story focuses solely on Liana's journey and how she found out the things she did, it's better to have her take the whole POV for the whole story. If you are worried about not being able to present the scenes with Damlin's and Addan's POV, then we're going back to the first point of making use of them more or at least, bringing their arcs to a proper close.

Second point would be to flesh out the villain more and plant clues of their plan and motivations throughout the whole story instead of just info-dumping everything through a flashback and a last-minute reveal. You could lose your readers along the way with that. What does your villain want? Why do they want it? What are they doing to attain it? Why haven't they done it before the MC and other characters came into the picture? Things like that are bound to make your villain, and ultimately, your plot and ending to be satisfying and intriguing.

Lastly, I guess the prose and grammar still need improvement. Along the way, there are consistent punctuation errors, especially concerning the word "and" and when to use a comma with it and when not to. There are many google articles about this! There are also cases of typos, missing words, and wrong a/an conjugation as well as subject-verb agreement. Nothing a good line edit wouldn't fix, though.

Paragraph flow also needs a bit more work since some of them do not have the most impact. Avoid using passive voice in describing a scene, especially if they're done every sentence in a single paragraph. Use different sentence structures, combining long and short ones to make your prose flow better. There are also many google articles about this. :))

Final verdict: This story is 7/10 on my scale. It's got the beginnings of a good and engaging fantasy world but there are some stuff that needs working on to make it fully shine. Keep writing. You'll get there in no time. :)