Golden Arrow Reviews

Review #31: Castle

Reviewer: _RoseThorn_

Story: “Castle (The Badlands Series)” by EmberShy
________________________________________________
✿ Cover ✿

Your cover is very eye-catching and I love the black, grey, and red theme it has. The font used for the title allows it to stand out and the subtitle is easy to read, even for people on smaller devices like phones, for example. I like the different graphics and how they are layered and blended together. It’s easy to tell that lots of thought and effort was put into creating this book cover.
________________________________________________
✿ Summary ✿

The first sentence in your summary should be put in quotation marks, since it is stating something that your character has written. There are also a couple missing commas and sentences that you could reword to improve the flow. You also do not capitalize the word “queen” unless it is used as a title before someone’s name (eg. Queen Anna) or if it is referring to a specific queen (eg. The Queen is an evil woman). Aside from that, the concept of the story sounds pretty intriguing. There’s a lot left up to readers’ imaginations to think about what challenges Emlyn will face after life as she has known it is drastically changed.
________________________________________________
✿ Grammar, Spelling and Vocabulary ✿

Overall, your grammar allows for the book to be clear and understandable, although it could benefit from a bit of improvement. I didn’t find the story confusing at any point and you have no issues with spelling as far as I saw. I noticed some missing commas throughout the chapters. There were quite a few instances where you repeated the exact same or similar words like “falling” and “fell” in the same sentence. I would suggest expanding your vocabulary a little more and finding different synonyms to put in parts such as those for a little more variety. You should also avoid using the word “and” too many times in a single sentence. I spotted a few of those instances, so you may want to consider changing them or simply listing things using commas instead of a bunch of “ands”.

________________________________________________
✿ Characters ✿

Emlyn Lovet seems like a kindhearted person and although she isn’t your typical fighter type, she is still a strong lead in a different way. The fact that she was able to cope with the loss of her parents and living alone, as well as adapting so quickly to the fantasy world she got dragged into shows her incredible strength. I liked that she didn’t bother fighting Camilla with violence during their first encounter. Her main instinct to use love against her enemy shows that she is a good-natured person, who I could see tons of readers rooting for. Camilla, on the other hand, is extremely explosive and full of rage. It leads readers to wonder if that is simply the way she has always been or if something had caused her to become like that. As for Stella and Horrace, they act as Emlyn’s guides and so far, they seem like genuine and helpful people. I bet a lot of your newer readers may be wondering if these characters remain this way, or if they turn out to be evil in some unexpected plot twist.

________________________________________________
✿ Plot ✿

I like that you alluded to the song “Castle” by Halsey (or at least that’s what I think you were going for). There were a bunch of subtle references to both the song and album (such as ”The Badlands Series”), which were fun to see. The flow of this story is really good. You don’t drag things out, nor do you rush them to the point where readers start getting lost. The idea of having Emlyn’s life change so dramatically was quite intriguing and I enjoyed seeing the new fantasy world unfold, along with meeting the unique characters that were introduced with it.  I’m curious to discover why Emlyn is destined to be queen and how she will defeat Camilla. I also liked your chapter lengths, which were very manageable. This helps hold readers’ attention, as a lot of people tend to get bored by extremely long chapters in Wattpad books.
________________________________________________