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 Review #4756503 |
 | Windows om Our World: Faith - excerpt  [13+] An excerpt from my second fantasy novel. Visit www.lesbillgates.com for more info.  |
| (4.0)  HAPPY WDC ACCOUNT ANNIVERSARY FROM "Anniversary Reviews"   First Impressions: This being chapter 8 of your second novel in a series, I didn’t expect to understand what was going on, but even though I was missing context, this excerpt can actually stand on its own. The readers only know about Vinny what you tell them in this chapter, but it appears to be the first time he meets the Silkie which makes it a good excerpt - the readers find out about them as he does. I’m guessing it’s a different spelling of the mythical Selkie because they seem the same, although it could be that they are your own take on the legend, which would be interesting. Muiroigh is helpful and kind once she realises she is not forced into a relationship she didn’t agree to, and the readers learn something about Vinny as well in that scene when he doesn’t take advantage of the situation. Perhaps it simply didn’t fit with his plans at this point, but it made him come across like a nice guy, anyway.  Suggestions: As this is already published, I’m guessing you’re not particularly interested in edits, so I’m just going to leave a couple of general suggestions that might be helpful, or not - take what you can use and disregard the rest. There were a lot of sentences that told the readers what Vinny was doing, especially at the beginning. He had walked… He bent… He clambered… He collapsed… He lay down… He listened… By the fourth paragraph, this became quite repetitive, and I would suggest changing the sentence structure so at least they don’t all start with “he did something”. Better still, show the readers what he was doing instead of telling them. Instead of saying, He collapsed onto his knees, have his knees collide hard with the ground, or something like that. It makes the images more vivid. Exclamation marks have a place in dialogue (used sparingly) if you want to convey excitement, but if you use them in narrative for emphasis, it comes across like you didn’t trust the words to make the readers understand why something was important and needed the punctuation to draw attention to it. In this sentence, he saw a piece of blue amber!, I’m guessing that piece of amber will become important later so you wanted the readers to notice when he picked it up. A more effective way of doing that would be to have him look at it, weigh it in his hands, hold it up to the light, let him notice the different shades of it - anything to make it memorable to the readers. Once you’ve done that, you can do away with the exclamation mark because the readers will know it’s important.  Final Thoughts: I assume you didn’t post this to get reviews but to sell the book, so I’m not going to waste your time with a lengthy review. There were, of course, some details in this chapter that would have been explained in previous chapters, and I wouldn’t want to guess where the plot might be going because I don’t know enough about how Vinny got to this point, but the story sounds interesting. ** Image ID #2154080 Unavailable **  My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 06/11/2024 @ 11:26pm EDT