Jabberwocky Reviews

18. Moonlight Oaths by laylagriffin_

@laylagriffin_, Moonlight Oaths

"❛ 𝐃𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐚 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐟𝐚𝐭𝐞. ❜

The tale of how a mortal became an immortal and also found love along the way.

******

Banished away to a dying realm, Nian Zhen, a young mortal prince, believes all hope is lost and that he'd die a painful death in the hands of the evil creatures roaming around in it. However, he is soon rescued by a kind-hearted woman who offers him a new identity and a second chance at life. He becomes the woman's adoptive son, forming a bond that he had never had before.

But he finds out that even this new life didn't come without its baggage; starting with the beautiful Heavenly General's daughter that plagues his dreams, and two big-slitted eyes in his mind that fuel his greed.

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Note: Currently Not Edited

(An Wuxia/Xianxia-inspired original novel.)"

I think your blurb is clear, but there are some bits of awkward wording you'd be behooved to fix. There's something about "roaming around in it" that I dislike because the clause feels trailing, but I don't know how you'd fix it, and the semicolon in the second paragraph is incorrect. Don't forget that they generally separate clauses that can stand on their own.

Going into the prologue, some odd word choices persist—when you say "wide trucks," I imagine that there are giant vehicles floating in the sky—and you also stumble into a pet peeve I have where you have paragraphs that are single sentences long. I know it's standard practice for Wattpad, and I know there are reasons one might not want to have sprawling paragraphs in an online book. But the reason why I dislike this is because it makes the flow of the description become choppy: it emphasizes how we're jumping from point to point at whim. The last few "paragraphs" of your prologue would read completely normally as one paragraph, for instance, but for whatever reason we have sentences like "But with a big, almost unbearable cost" standing on their own. I think your prose, as a whole is fine, but how it's presented feels discordant in this way.

I'd also put the glossary before the prologue, which would be more standard formatting. Just a small thing.

To elaborate more on what I said about putting sentences in their own paragraphs: paragraphs aren't meant just for the reader to ease their reading and make sure we aren't reading a single block of text, they're to accentuate the flow of the narrative and to sort ideas. We lose this when we end up with five different paragraphs explaining what's happening to Nian Zhen's mother—and this even makes the exposition feel longer than it actually is.

In general, watch for typos—I know you said this wasn't edited in the blurb, but keep in mind that some things like improper possessive phrases (e.g. "His father eldest and most trusted guard") tend not to be caught by autocorrect software. I'd also lump into this awkward phrases with dangling modifiers; one example is, earlier in that first chapter, "The voice of his wet nurse screamed slowly dying...," where you need a comma or something in there to make it clear the wet nurse is not the one slowly dying. I know I'm mainly commenting on grammar stuff, but since this story is still being written and we're at the beginning, I'd rather comment on things that are fixable now versus trying to speculate about what hasn't yet been published.

I admittedly haven't read much wuxia/xianxia, so I can't comment much on if pacing/plot is appropriate for the genre, but nothing stood out to me as an issue on this front, and consequently I have little to say. I try to reserve my words when I'm not talking about my area of expertise. This is also because this book is still being written, so we're still in the expository phase instead of the main plot. If this were a complete book I'd have more to say. I'll give you an 80/100: nothing stood out to me as grievously wrong, but there are some things that still need to be fixed in editing. Good start.