Book Reviews ||CLOSED||

Rebellion: Prince of Dawn

As mentioned earlier, the books will be reviewed based on the following criteria:

♠Title
♠Cover
♠Blurb
♠Grammar
♠Point of view execution
♠Story pacing
♠Writing style
♠Punctuation

Title: Rebellion: Prince of Dawn

Writer: jachinthebox

Genre: Fantasy

Review

Title: I'll give the title a 7/10 because I saw the rebellion in the story and even from the blurb it was pretty obvious where the title came from. Though the prince of dawn part was not very clear in the first five chapters.

The title is quite catchy, to be honest. It picks the main aim of the story and puts it out there so that a reader would know what they're getting into in the first place so I'd say you did a nice job there.

Cover: Considering the genre, I think the cover did justice to the story. I'll commend the extra effort to find the background picture because the anime character just matches the title, blurb and the main character. And thanks to the cover, we have a picture of the story in our head. But then the rest of the design isn't so catchy and there's nothing particularly creative about it.

Blurb: The blurb is kinda catchy but it doesn't really do justice to the story. It leaves us hanging, yeah, but then there's a question of what the main point of the story is. The first part explains like the first ten chapters of the book and then the second part is what the book is really about but it doesn't leave us longing for more. It's a cliffhanger, yeah, but it's not just enough to actually get me to want to read the story. And I feel like the first part gave out way too much information about the story.

Grammar: The grammar was okay and flowed well for most parts but I had a problem with the syntax. The grammar also felt kind of childish. I'll give an instance from the first chapter. The paragraph read: Every man in the meeting room nodded their head.

The sentence was improper for a lot of reasons but I'll focus on the part of 'nodding their head'. Now that's something you'd call unnecessary telling. Simply saying 'nodded' would have been okay because your readers aren't daft and it's obvious that if they nodded, they did it with their head. Like, what else would they nod with?

Point of view execution: I'd say this was done properly. The story was in first person and it read just like that.

Story pacing: Based on the blurb, I'd expected the story to go a little faster but it turned out to be a bit slow. Since you'd already given a summary of the first few chapters in the blurb, I felt that part should have gone much faster. Like we know what going to happen already so just get it over with so that we can get to the interesting part. But apart from that, the pacing was actually okay.

Writing style: The writing style fits the genre. It was okay but I feel there's a lot that could have be shown but wasn't. I get that you don't really want to use dialogue tags (I'm personally not a fan too and I think it reads better without them) but that wasn't an excuse for dropping paragraphs upon paragraphs of quoted dialogue with nothing in between. Very few action tags could be spotted here and there but not enough to give it a proper flow.

Even if you don't use dialogue tags often, you can always accompany the dialogue with an action tag. It could be your character doing something as little as rolling a pen between their fingers or you could have them gesturing while they speak.

Whatever you do, adding action tags would not only make it clear who is speaking but also prevent the dialogue from feeling flat.

Another thing I'd like to address is the problem of telling instead of showing. I mentioned this earlier but I just want to give an instance.

A particular paragraph read: When I entered the room, the other lords seemed as if they were growing restless...

Now apart from the syntax (which really reads wrong), you could have shown the other lords' restlessness instead of just mentioning it.

You could have shown one of the lords impatiently tapping his foot on the ground or you could have had someone pacing around the room. You could have chosen to show any small action which would make the readers know that these people are restless.

As C.S. Lewis said, "Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description."

Punctuation: The punctuation was pretty good. I spotted only a few slips.

All in all, the story was pretty good and with a little bit more work it can be much better.