Librum de Periculum - CLOSED

Foxing Around by @Jade-Green-Wolf

Aljhin Package

*since your story comes in 28 parts, I'll be reviewing 4 at a time, coming to 7 portions of review*

Let's just dive right in!

Chapters 1–4
Okay. Your first chapter seems more like an extended summary. You said yourself in your author's note that this chapter doesn't have any moving characters, and  it's because it's not really a chapter.

It's your second chapter that actually feels like a first chapter.

First off, I don't recommend using all-caps pretty much ever. Almost every time I've encountered it in writing, it could be put in more professional italics instead. If italics still doesn't give you the emphasis you need, you have the entire English language to find it! This is a very consistent issue.

Second off, the "three years later" and the flyover that this chapter was was not my favorite in terms of "first chapters" (since this one had moving plot and the last chapter was more like an extended summary). The more you "fly over" time, the less engaged your readers are bound to be. Why? It's because they will feel like they're "missing scenes," scenes that they haven't "experienced" because you chose to fly over them. I'm not saying that flying over time is necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying that you do a lot of it in this second chapter and it makes the chapter a lot less exciting (consider the possibility of making the scene when Astra was 10 a prologue, perhaps?). Something you can do it to take out the going back in time and go right in the present. You can integrate Astra's past throughout instead of chunking it all here.

Third off, use italics instead of bold for emphasis. If you need to do italics within italics, just don't italicize the word you want emphasized ("I hated him").

Fourth off, you must put an end-mark at the end of every single sentence. And no—quotation marks do not count! "Like this."

Otherwise, I liked the setting and character you established in Astra. The emotion was pretty good, too.

Moving on to the second chapter, I don't see the point to the flashback besides mentioning mates. The transition into the flashback didn't make sense with the context (in other words, why would that flashback come to mind?) and it was formatted incorrectly (it should be placed in italics). However, I don't know if the flashback has to necessarily be a flashback.

For accumulating errors, I'm taking a point off. Your total is negative one.

Chapter 3—I liked the fight. Although you wrote "2" instead of "two" (numbers under three syllables should be written in word form in novels) and although your dialogue was incorrect at times (always make a new paragraph whenever someone else speaks), I really liked the fight between Astra and the two wolves. Plus one point for that. Your total is zero.

Keep in mind the difference between "it's" and "its" (one is a contraction and one is possessive).

You also have a few verb tense issues. Be careful not to switch to present tense.

Just so you know, foxes are hunters of small game. I don't know if they'd really kill an abandoned fawn, but maybe it's the werefox rather than the fox on its own (you'd have to really do some explaining if I'm to buy this; I should know what foxes eat—they slaughter my chickens and eat my property's wild rabbits and voles all the time). Also, foxes don't have an "earthy" smell. It's musky, similar to the smell of a skunk, though less prominent (believe me—I've seen and smelled many foxes in my life). Foxes may look a bit like wolves, but they're much smaller and less "apex predator," if you know what I mean. They're smaller, so they hunt smaller things and don't typically attack larger things (I understand the moon gifted Astra with extra strength, though; I'm just saying it for the prey she catches—there's no reason for her to hunt anything more than she'd ever hunt before and if there is, it needs clarification). Know your foxes, because someone like me who's seen and smelled and tracked and trapped and killed them will see right through the fallacies that aren't explained by the moon or whatever. You can do better!