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Chances and Destinies -Review by @Davrielle

Story: Chances and Destinies

Genre: Historical Fiction

Author: @TwinkleOn

Reviewer: Davrielle

What the story is about: A young girl makes friends with a princess, and meets her brother, Nicholas, a prince, who falls in love with her. Her friend, the princess, ends up falling in love with a guard.

Okay so to begin, upon requesting a review, there IS a warning saying that we do not hand out praises in this review book, so please take what is here with a grain of salt and use it to improve your writing.

So now I will go on to say what I liked about the story, as I thought it would be good to start with the positives.

The dialogue. It is clean, it flows. It serves it's purpose. Sure, it's rough and around the edges, but it is definitely one of the stronger points of this story or from what I read. If there is one thing I would critique on, is that the author stay away from forcing their own thoughts and feelings about the plot onto the characters. Basically what I mean by authorial intrusion is from what I am paraphrasing from one of Lily's dialogues. "My mother is dead, though she never treated me well," etc. Refrain from exposing too much. Also with Lily being poor in her dialogue. The reader doesn't need to know this in her dialogue. Just show the fact that Lily is poor, through showing description of that.

The effort that the author took into putting the world together, while one that could have been constructed with more refined strokes, was undeniable. I can tell as a reviewer and writer that the writer did try to spend time world building and writing, which is all good, so there is that.

The characters, while at most times, flat and one dimensional, did have moments where they showed true potential, and I'll let the author know it was the moment when Lily was saying that Nicholas was a sadist. There's real potential there because it shows that there is more than one side to the Prince. Please, when you set out to rewrite, reconsider making this scene more of an impact.

Now on to the nitty gritty stuff. I hope the author finds these comments helpful.

I'm going to be honest here. As honest as I can be because the author seems like a sweet person, and I know there are some reviewers that are harsher than me.

I am only mentioning these things because I desperately want the author to improve their writing. I can see myself in her when I was a young writer and I know she has potential to shine. I hope she finds my feedback helpful in some way and can benefit from this review. It would make me so happy.

Despite the feelings I had about this, the story does have a lot of potential to go somewhere, but at the moment, it really needs a lot of work.

I really wanted to read the entire story like I normally do, but I ultimately threw in the towel and I stopped reading at ten chapters, and I normally stick around. But the reason why I stopped is because I had a lot of issues with the presentation of the story, and most of the time my gripes were with Lily herself.

I normally like to stick around and read the whole thing, but I sadly couldn't do it. I said in the review book rules that I would read ten chapters, so I stuck in that long to see if the story would really go anywhere and by chapter ten, the story didn't really do much for me.

It honestly didn't. There were maybe two interesting plot developments between her and Nicholas toward chapter nine, that could have been expanded on, but it felt flimsy and the presentation was awkward. I liked the questions that was raised about the prince's morals, and what the lines of duty and law were, but it seemed kind of, I don't know, cut and dry? I think if the author is going for a morally ambiguous character, they could present it in a stronger, further clarified light.