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Regal Reckoning [Alba)

Book: Regal Reckoning
Author: blue512_lagoons and Iseaul09
Reviewer: oraclesighter
Chapters read: 7

Starting off with the title, it’s catchy and intriguing. It hints on the genre of the story, as well as some sort of conflict involving royalty. It’s dramatic and definitely attention-grabbing — suitable for a historical fiction story.

The cover must have been what grabbed my attention the most. The design is just outstanding! The color scheme with the golden tones, along with the flowery borders makes for an elegant and regal vibe. It’s perfect for the story, and in general, very eye-catching.

Moving onto the blurb, the first line is incredibly compelling. It makes me want to find out more and stirs curiosity within me.

Continuing onward, I think the main conflict becomes a bit clouded with the word “politics” I think that deceit gives a bit more context as to what will happen, but incorporating the word “politics” doesn’t really reveal anything new about the plot. More than anything, it confuses me, because not enough context is given here.

It could be improved by removing the word “politics,” since if you’re going to read about a historical fiction book concerning royalty, you’d know that you’d be in for topics surrounding politics and diplomacy. So it doesn’t do much to hook the readers in. More than anything it’s just there to fill in the extra space.

Other than that, I consider the line of “the price of knowledge could be life itself” to be very captivating, as it raises the stakes and creates a conflict involving the possibility of a deathly situation.

However, the oncoming parts of the blurb after that were a bit confusing to me.

“Elevating both kingdoms'wynns,” what does that mean? Are you referring to “wins” or is this a potentially made up word — or perhaps a word taken directly from another language?

It’s not too clear what this line is trying to get across here.

And then comes the term “Communalatics.” This is not an actual word in the English dictionary, so it’s confusing as to what this means. If this is a made up term for your story, or a word from a different language, I’d recommend you give some context for the meaning. Give a brief example of what a Communalatic is, or what they have done in the past, etc. Anything that can make it clearer for the reader to grasp.

And the last line “Or will they lead to each other's chain of end without wreaking” doesn’t make sense at all. The word “wreaking” has been used incorrectly here. In fact, I’m not even sure whether you should include that word in a line like this. The point is, I can’t really generate a suggestion for you as I don’t understand what this means. What I can say is that I’d suggest you rephrase it.

There are also various spelling mistakes and incorrect uses of punctuation in the blurb. This is a HUGE negative point, as it will most likely whisk potential readers away from your story and, in general, leave a bad impression on the audience. If a reader catches spelling mistakes in the blurb, they’d expect to catch them in your chapters as well — it’s distracting and takes away your credibility as an author.

I encourage you to use editing tools such as Hemingway Editor or Grammarly to do the copyediting for you. That way, you don’t have to sit through your entire page trying to spot the errors yourself, but the program will do it for you instead.

Concerning the plot, the hooks in the prologue and first few pages were extremely gripping and attention-grabbing. Especially in the prologue, a lot of things were mentioned in manners that managed to reel me in and want to find out more about this world, their kingdom, and what's happened to the king and queen. We get introduced to a world that seems like it’s gone through some sort of war or been damaged in grand ways. I assume this is the aftermath of what shall occur in the story, and it’s immensely compelling. It makes me want to find out how this happened in the first place.