Sapphire's Review Store 💙

Review by Sunshine: His Queen Her King

Title: His Queen Her King

Author: Imperfetto_Tesoro

Summary: 3.5/5

You've got a pretty intriguing summary! I do like the way you introduce the two main characters and show how their lives converge, and I thought the ending of your summary was simply fantastic. It was powerful, dramatic, and incredibly intriguing.

I do think you have the space to expand your summary. I think it would be incredibly more effective to show who these enemies are, and what the stakes are. Without the stakes, it almost feels as if the summary is missing a backbone. Why are people trying to end the alliance? What is the significance of it?

Also, I know you said not to worry about grammar because it hasn't been edited, but I think I will go over mistakes I find consistently because those are less likely due to editing, but more due to a lack of understanding. In this summary, I didn't find anything too glaring, but your use of hyphen just doesn't seem right to me. For example:

"... the only thing he cares about more than himself – his son Giovanni."

The hyphen isn't quite as effective as a colon would be. A colon would be more impactful, or even replacing the hyphen with the word 'is' would suffice perfectly. The other hyphen you used in the summary didn't quite make sense. It was:

"Forged conjointly by marriage, binding them together for life – they're about to see that things aren't what they seem to believe."

Again, the hyphen just doesn't sit well there. A comma would have sufficed in this case. 

Grammar: 2.5/5

Okay, so, as mentioned above, you asked me not to focus too much on this because your story hasn't been edited. That being said, I found errors within your story that was repeated consistently, so I wondered whether you knew some of the rules or not. So, I thought I might take you through them so that your editing process is a lot more informed.

First of all: punctuation. Honestly, it's a little messy. Let's start with punctuation within dialogue. If dialogue is followed by a verbal tag (such as 'he said', 'she whispered', 'she 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 exclamation mark for an exclamation). For example:

"Don't you ever disrespect your mother, boy." He says.

In the example above, "he says" is a verbal tag. It should be:

"Don't you ever disrespect your mother, boy," he says.

Another example:

"Hi, daddy," I return the hug.

There were two mistakes in this one. First of all, "I return the hug" is not a verbal tag, so there should be a full-stop instead of the comma. Secondly, the word 'daddy' should begin with a capital letter because it is used as a proper noun. It is what the character is calling the other character. So, overall, it should be:

"Hi, Daddy." I return the hug.

Next: semicolons. A semicolon is used to separate two clauses that can work perfectly as sentences on their own, but are strongly intertwined. I've been told that a semicolon is even a good replacement for the word 'because' or 'so' in some instances. Now, you have written: