Rebel Town Reviews [OPEN]

Blood Ties Review

Blood Ties

By

LilyOnee

Reviewed

By

AmyMarieZ

Overview: Blood Ties is a fantasy story following Kaira, a half fairy, half blood-elf. After the death of her aunt, Kaira is sent to a boarding school for magical creatures where her Uncle Luther is the Headmaster. Although being a half-breed sets her apart from most of the other students, she manages to befriend a number of other odd-balls at the school. However, as their friendship grows, they begin to notice strange noises coming from one of the campus buildings. The group must push their magical abilities to the edge to figure out what is really going on at their school.

Structure: The story begins with a prologue that introduces two of the most important characters, Kaira and her uncle, Luther. From there, the first three chapters introduce other characters and set the scene. While the scene setting and character introductions are excellent, the chapters are very long and do not develop much suspense or plot, which may lead to a reader losing interest in the story. In chapter four, the plot and suspense really kicks in. From chapter five on, while the chapters are still very sizable chunks of material, the interest is there and a reader won't really be able to put the story down.

At the beginning, the story is written in third person point of view, primarily limited to Kaira with occasional shifts to show other character's view points. As the story progresses, the view point switches become more frequent and extended. The switches feel somewhat awkward at first, but towards the end, the story shifts to more of an omniscient POV and feels natural again.

Grammar: Overall, the grammar is very good. There are errors in capitalization dispersed throughout the story and other minor typos and missed words or awkwardly worded sentences. The story feels like it could use a good round of proofreading. However, the grammatical errors and mistakes are not significant enough or frequent enough to detract from the reading experience.

Pace: Individual scenes read at a slower than real time pace. The amount of setting and character descriptions significantly slows the reading speed to where it becomes tedious at points. Frequently, the flow of the story is halted to break to describe the scene in excessive detail, particularly in the first three chapters. Working more of the description into the flow of action or pushing some of the descriptions of scenery to later chapters could help to move the story along at a more engaging pace.

During dialog, actions of each character are precisely described (i.e. where characters are looking, what they are doing with their hands, etc.). While some amount of this is great for helping the reader to visualize the scene, leaving more of it to the reader's imagination and just providing a few hints could help to speed up the pace

The story as a whole begins at a decent pace in the prologue. The main characters are introduced promptly, and then the inciting incident (the death of Kaira's aunt) occurs. However, the plot progression drags over the next three long chapters where other characters at the school are introduced and the scene is set. It isn't until chapter four when the really juicy part of the story begins. However, once this point is reached, the story takes off. While individual scenes still run a bit slow, the story itself just begins to move and becomes more and more interesting, suspenseful, and intriguing with each chapter!

Character Development: The character development is excellent. For a story with six major characters (Kaira and her friends Lorcan, Enya, Milfleur, Avery, and Jericho), all of the characters are extremely well defined and easy to differentiate between. Each of the characters have their own voice in dialog and distinct personalities. The characters play well off of each other and have very believable interactions.

A reader can get a great idea of each of character's personality just from actions and dialog. However, at times, it seems like the narration pauses to specifically point out characteristics that are already apparent to the reader just by observation. These bits of narration seem somewhat unnecessary, because the characterization is excellent without them and they often slow the pace to tell the reader what he or she already has observed.

Vocabulary/Description: The world the author has created is rich and filled with interesting characters and settings that are described vividly! However, the sheer amount of description seems to detract from the descriptions themselves. Rather than describing a few important aspects of each scene, nearly every bit of each setting is described. A reader may become a bit bored while reading through the excess of description. The descriptions of characters themselves are also vivid, however the characters are often re-described, becoming a bit repetitive because the reader can already get a great image of each of the characters from the first few descriptions of them.

Descriptions are well-written overall, however they are often not worked into the actions. The story contains many "there was" and "there were" sentences which feel less engaging because they show no action, only description.

Plot: Although the pace of the plot is slow (especially at the beginning), once it gets going it is highly interesting. The plot contains a huge amount of mystery and suspense about what is going on at the school. The plot also has a perfect amount of subplot based around the relationships between all of the main characters. The balance of character and plot in the story really makes it one that is hard to stop reading. The plot is clearly conveyed throughout the entire story. There are never any points of confusion about what is going on.

Question: What is your view on the characters and their bonds?

My view on the characters is that they are a very diverse and interesting bunch. Actually, I love them all. I think that the strong bond between the characters is clearly shown. I can really tell how close they all are to each other. It seems like at times the story goes out of its way to explain to the reader how close the characters are, but it really doesn't need to. The bonds between the characters are well developed and believable. While I love the plot of the story, I think it is the characters themselves that really make it stand out to me. I just loved reading about their little plots and adventures together, and felt myself getting excited about their excitement, which is perfect!

Summary: Blood Ties is a compelling fantasy story filled with mystery, magic and suspense! The characters make the story entertaining and a pleasure to read. The setting of a magical school filled with lovely magical creatures is really one that can't go wrong because it is just so fun to read about! Although it takes a bit of time to pick up and really get going, once it does Blood Ties is a story a reader won't want to end because the characters are just that engaging!

Note: The review book offers several options. To review only grammar and sentence structure. To review only character development and plot. To review only vocabulary and descriptions. Or, the requester can ask for all of this to be reviewed. There are two options when making this request – for it to be sugar-coated or not.

This review is for it all to be touched on (not sugar-coated).