I have no reviews currently on this site so I’ll bite. Tell me what you think.
Vania is a country that worships heroes who use magic to battle powerful beasts. Fey is born into this utopian society unable to sense mana and therefore unable to cast magic. Still he strives to become a hero. After turning 17 he starts having mysterious dreams and visions that slowly...
www.scribblehub.com
The description is pretty cool, tho a bit vague. Still, it tells me just enough about what the story is gonna be about(action fantasy?) that I might just read it. Vibes of anti-hero mc, perhaps some kind of large war?
Then the chapter begins with mc talking to his mother. I wasn't sure how old he's supposed to be, but based on his language and behavior I'd say no more than 5 year old. There is no way he wouldn't realize he's hurting his mother with his dream otherwise, and wouldn't come to her for "reassurance" in the first place if he was older.
Then the training combat scene starts, and he's suddenly acting like a teenager? Was there a 10 year time skip or something? Well, whatever.
The action scene was pretty messy, consider this sentence:
My confidence was riding high after consecutive perfect evasions, I was circling around Emilia, slowly making my way back towards her and soon, I might be able to strike at her.
Could be divided into several smaller ones easily.
Then chapter ends, and there's not much there that would make me click on the next one. We have adopted mc who's either extremely socially inept or callous(so not very likable) and two other seemingly major characters introduced, his mother and emilia. We have his quest for becoming a knight, but that we already knew from synopsis. There are bits and pieces about setting mentioned in a dialog, but not much enough for us to know or even picture what kinda place the action is happening in, or what.
So in other words, after reading synopsis and one chapter, the reader(me!) has three elements:
1. Cover and synopsis, action rebellion anti-hero awooga awooga
2. MC's dream and past, mystery and family drama
3. Action packed training scene with friends
And these 3 elements kinda don't flow. Like pieces of a puzzle that don't fit. After getting reader interested in mc's past, it would be better to capitalize on that and continue that plot line, and start with training scene in chapter 2. Or some other chapter later. Or start with training, and only reveal that mc is adopted later....
The first-person prose is done rather crudely, too. Especially the dream/flashback part. Surely there was a better way to tell this story than just writing it normally in first person pov like the rest of the book? Also, I'm not sure what kinda first-person pov it is. It kinda reads like present tense poc, except it's in past tense and the protag sometimes knows things that didn't happen yet. But then, it's not fully committed to past tense to feel like the mc is telling his story from the pov of future.
As long as you give me a one-star review, that sounds lovely :)
oh, then I'm afraid I can't do it. I don't think your story is 1 star tier.
