Reviews: Free and Simple - Closed for Catch Up!

Review 29 - A Cold Cry

Title: A Cold Cry
Author: autumn_sunfire
Genre: Fantasy
Status: n/a
Mature: n/a
Short summary: n/a

First Impression 7/10 -

Title: I like your title, but I also don't. It's unique, I'll give you that, but you don't normally use cold to describe cry. It confuses me because I don't know what you mean by it.

Cover: I don't really like your cover for two main reasons. The first is that I don't like your font and background. The background seems weird (it has this weird circle in the middle?) and I'm just not a fan of the font. The second thing is that the background clashes with the title. The title kinda blends into the background, so I would try to fix that.

Summary:  Your summary is interesting, but it gives us too much confusing information at once. I would have eased the readers into it more instead of giving us confusing language and people.

Dialogue/Grammar 9/10 - I didn't notice any issues with the dialogue, but there was one thing that I'm not sure about. You used semicolons a lot and I don't know if they necessarily belonged everywhere you put them. I know you're writing in an older style, so that's what made me not too sure about it. If it's fine, you can ignore this, I'm just stating what I thought.

Characters n/a/10 - I haven't been exposed to characters that I feel I could judge, so I'll just be skipping this section. If you want, you can give me specific characters to look at and I'll update this section, but for now, I'll just leave it be.

Chapter Lengths 8/10 - The first few chapters are incredibly short. While I like short chapters, these are just too short for my liking. I'm not sure if you want to make them any longer or add more into each one, but currently I find that they don't give off a lot in each one.

Descriptions 10/10 - Your descriptions were very beautiful. I get a very J. R. R. Tolkien vibe from our writing (I thank you for not doing descriptions like him oh boy) who is one of my favorite authors. They gave a good view of what was going on without being too wordy. *cough* Tolkien *cough*

Plot 7/10 - The plot seems quite bland in the first few chapters, mainly because readers don't have much idea what's happening. You throw names and words at us that are quite hard to say and with very little context. The guide you posted at the end of one of the chapters for pronunciation was quite confusing in my opinion. For that, my suggestion is making a glossary that includes the pronunciation of each foreign word, like a dictionary does. The plot as a whole intrigues me, you just didn't seem to catch my attention through the first few chapters.

Overall 8.2/10 - Overall, I like the vibe your book gives off. I just think it's a little confusing at first and could possibly need some clarification, especially on the language you include. This book definitely has great potential.