In My Opinion

Loyalties Lie by DragonRose25

Title: Loyalties Lie by DragonRose25
Source: Feedback request
Genre: Romance
Mature: Y (assassination, blood, bullying, decapitation, death, loss of a loved one, murder, physical abuse, occasional strong profanity, prostitution, sexual abuse, sexual references, suicide, torture, trauma, violence)
LGBTQIAP+: N
Status: Ongoing
First impressions: 38/40
Digging deeper: 97/100
Final thoughts: pending

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*****

First impressions: 38/40

Title: 10/10
Very thought-provoking title. If you can't trust loyalty, what can you trust? This works well for a romance story, and it would work for many other genres, too—thriller, mystery, fantasy, etc.

Story description: 9/10
Overall, this is a fantastic blurb. It introduces the main characters and sets up the plot conflict without giving too much away, and it's very clean, grammatically speaking. I have a couple of suggestions, but that's all they are, so you can take or leave them as you please.

First, in the opening paragraph, I think I'd change "the growing rebellion" to "a growing rebellion," because this is the first mention of the rebellion. To me, "the" feels like I should have prior knowledge about it, but I don't. Again, that's just my impression, though, so there's nothing wrong with leaving it as is.

Second, and this is something I've been focusing on in my writing, so I see it everywhere now, the two instances of "as" in the same sentence of the third paragraph bother me. You could swap the second "as" for "while" and get rid of that repetition.

But that's really it, and that's clearly me being nitpicky. I love romance involving royalty, especially when one person is of a lower caste in society, and (this will sound weird) I enjoy all the conflict and trauma. Turbulence is good in my book. And it should be, since I write that kind of story. 😉

Cover: 10/10
I love this cover. The black and red reinforces the darkness and trust issues from the title, and the blood trickling down her hand from the rose further emphasizes how dangerous betrayal can be. The simplicity of a neat white cursive for the title and your name pops from the background but does not detract from the imagery. You could potentially bump the size of your name up just slightly, but I think it's fine the way it is. Beautiful dark, foreboding cover.

First chapter (and everything that came before it): 9/10
Ah, this prologue. I read it after finishing a batch of judging and then got more judging piled on top of me, so I reread it as a refresher. And from the first paragraph, I remembered everything about it. It's a very powerful, memorable start to a story. The series of "she loved" statements in the opening paragraph and "she hated" statements in the closing paragraph is so well done, and the in-between—well, it's just fantastic. Your transition from the happy, light Mina, who can overlook all the difficulties and see the beauty in everything, to the intruding reality of the intrinsic difficulties and inequalities commoners like her and Kirian face gives a slight but building sense of foreboding. And then it happens—that single rock which triggers trauma and tragedy. The fear and anger grows as the king torments the two kids, until the single shocking moment when—well, I don't want to spoil it for other readers. Let's just say there's a very good reason Mina hates everything at the end of the prologue.

And, as with the blurb, this is very polished and grammatically correct, with just a couple of things I'd noted previously in the inline comments. You could consider splitting some of the larger paragraphs up, since phone readers on Wattpad like shorter paragraphs, but I like the divisions the way they are.