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Review by Sunshine: The Cursed Prince

Title: The Cursed Prince

Author: Tris_fire

Quick Notes:

- You have asked me to also point out any awkward vocabulary. I have discussed vocabulary in the "writing style" section of this review.

- You have also asked me to give suggestions regarding descriptions. I have also discussed this in the "writing style" section of this review. 

Summary: 3/5

Only a regular day, if I popped into the bookstore, picked up a review, and saw a summary like yours – one that involves magic, betrayal, badass characters, mazes, secrets, princes and beasts – I would be thrilled. I would pick it up and cherish every moment of it.

And that's what yours could have made me do. It shows many promising elements. I love the way you introduced the two characters, and the conflict, context, and stakes are exceptionally clear. Well done!

However, I didn't feel drawn to it. Why? The grammar needs work. Normally, I wouldn't focus on grammar in the summary part, but it did get to a point where I was rereading the summary because I couldn't grasp what you were trying to say. So, I thought that I would break it down for you:

"Meet Nova, A skilled Assassin from the future is sent to the past to kill a creature, called the Beast."

This sentence is grammatically incorrect for a number of reasons. Words like 'A' and 'Assassin' do not need to be capitalised, and the sentence itself does not connect with the 'Meet Nova'. The comma before the word 'called' is also unnecessary. It should be:

"Meet Nova: a skilled assassin from the future who has been sent to the past to kill a creature called the Beast."

Next:

"The fate of the Supernatural's rests in her hands..."

The capitalisation of the word 'supernatural' is entirely up to you, but I thought I'd mention it because, later in the summary, you chose not to capitalise it. You need to decide on one way to present it and stick to this. Also, you don't need the apostrophe.

In the paragraph about Medea, you are missing a full-stop between the words 'future' and 'Or'. Also, I think that, if you're going to follow the 'Meet this character' trope, and you introduce more than one character, I think it is important to show how their lives will connect. Otherwise, the whole paragraph about Medea seemed completely irrelevant because it didn't quite contribute to the summary in the same way that Nova's paragraph did.

As for the title, which you have asked me to discuss, I think it is apt. It gets the general themes of the story across, though I did notice that your story contains lots of motifs of entrapment. I wondered whether you may want to use that in your title, such as 'The Trapped Prince'. But 'Cursed' works perfectly as well. 

Grammar: 2.5/5

Okay, so there were a lot of minor errors and some bigger, more glaring issues that I found throughout your story. I recommend that you go back and polish up a few things – there were sentences missing full-stops, and there were beginnings of sentences that were missing capital letters. I've decided to break down all the errors I found using examples from your story.

First of all, punctuation and dialogue. If dialogue is followed by a verbal tag (such as 'he said', 'she whispered', 'she exclaimed' – or anything referring to how the character says the words), there should be a comma before the closing inverted commas. If it's anything else, this comma should be replaced by a period (or a question mark for a question and exclamation mark for an exclamation). For example: