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Review #39 | Royal Deception

Title: Royal Deception

Author: tannyprecious

 

Summary: 3/5

I think your summary does a good job highlighting the really unique traits to your story—especially the context and setting of the story, so well done! We can see relevant backstory, and all of it is quite succinct, which is great.

Overall, there seems to be a lack of cohesion in the summary once we pass the third sentence. You introduce the here who I assume are the main three, but then the final question throws me off—what would happen to them? A hint of 'deception' just feels too vague. There is deception in normal palaces everywhere—it's nothing completely out of the ordinary. I think you just need to make that more specific and give us a proper taste of what the conflict in your story is, and what the real stakes are. Currently, it doesn't have a strong pull because it feels like it's only really glossing over the premise of your story.

Also, the sentence about Kim needs polishing:

Kim Jungmyung the daughter of the Prime Minister had been betrothed to Prince Yi Sun since birth and she grew up to be best friends with both Princes, falling in love with her betrothed husband.

You need commas surround 'the daughter of the Prime Minister' for fluency. Additionally, the whole sentence lacks a clear direction and bounces around a bit. I would suggest a bit of a revision there.

Grammar: 2/5

Overall, I would recommend giving your story a grammatical sweep—there is dialogue missing punctuation marks before the quotation marks, as well as capitalised letters in incorrect spots. Additionally, I've noticed a few more complex grammatical rules being broken. Let's go through them!

Something I noticed towards the start was the missing pronouns. So, for example:

The beautiful sound of the birds singing pleasures my ears as lay on my soft bed...

"What is it?" I groaned as opened one eye to glance up at her.

These errors didn't persist in the story for too long, but they were present in the first few chapters. To complete the sentences, it should be:

The beautiful sound of the birds singing pleasures my ears as I lay on my soft bed...

"What is it?" I groaned as I opened one eye to glance up at her.

Next, let's talk about dialogue! When dialogue is followed by a verbal dialogue tag (such as 'he said', 'she whispered', 'they 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 an exclamation mark for an exclamation). For example:

"...if you would excuse us." Ji Yang said as he pulled me away from her.

It should be:

"...if you would excuse us," Ji Yang said as he pulled me away from her.

As for questions:

"Is that Prince Yi Sun and Yi Jung?" He asked.

Since 'He asked' is a dialogue tag, it is technically part of that sentence. It should be:

"Is that Prince Yi Sun and Yi Jung?" he asked.

Additionally, you have conflicting tenses at time, and conflicting perspectives. For example, with tenses, while you mostly write in past tense, there were moments where you slipped into present tense. For example: