CLN's Seasonal Reviews (CLOSED)

An Elixir of Zemblanity - by swastiana

REVIEW DONE BY : MaxwellStevens

I'll start by saying that, even though you're 13, your writing skills and overall maturity are closer to that of an adult, to be honest. If I keep in mind you're quite young and sugarcoat things, it won't help you at all. So, I'm going to pretend I don't know that and just give an honest, objective review. I think that's what could be the most helpful to you :)

Cover and Blurb :

They definitely could use some editing. The blurb is too short to be eye-catching. I know some people go for this style, but here, it just doesn't work. You really need to flesh it out a little bit. When it comes to the cover, I really like the idea, but it's a bit poorly executed. In fact, there's only one major problem: too many fonts! How many of them are there? Easily 5 or 6, maybe more. It's just too much. You can definitely use several fonts on the cover, even in the title, but this is just way too much. If this gets corrected, the cover will look really, really good.

I'll mostly be pointing out what doesn't work in my opinion, but please keep in mind that I really liked reading your book and I grew quite fond of it.

Writing style :

Most of your descriptions are absolutely fabulous. Honestly, you could teach some peeps out there how to write fricking descriptions. Yours are just amazing, I don't even have words for them. However, sometimes, they just don't work out. There's no middle ground in this story: either your descriptions are pure gold, or they really need to be worked on.

I think you're writing this story with too much seriousness. Don't get me wrong, I'm not telling you you're writing it like *hey, what if I wrote a story, aaay*. No, rather like, it's not light enough. It's serious almost all the time. When you add a little bit of humour, it's really great. I just wish there were more of these funny things you drop here and there, because as it currently is, the writing style sometimes look really pretentious and lacking of humility. For instance, the descriptions. As I said, they're mostly amazing. But sometimes there's just too much going on at the same time, your generosity makes them look all over the place. Mix this with really formal phrasing and you've got yourself a no-go paragraph.

Also, you need to be careful with your phrasing, your flow and your punctuation (we won't be mentioning the weird rule with the quotation marks tho lol). On the whole, the phrasing is great, but it's awkward sometimes. And watch out for run-on sentences! When your sentence is longer than the footlong chapter right before it, you know there's a problem. It feels like you sometimes don't know where to end your sentence, so you keep on writing. You really need to "learn" where to break down run-on sentences in smaller ones.

Girl, we need to talk about witches. I mean, whiches. You got what I mean. Too many of them, sometimes in places they really shouldn't be! It can sound very, very repetitive. What you could do to fix this: replace some instances with "that" or simply nothing. I tend to prefer to use "that" and nothing, and use "which" either when it is necessary (I guess you understood I'm talking about instances of "which" that can actually be replaced by "that" or nothing), or when I've already used both of the other solutions. Also, while I'm talking about repetitions, be careful. You tend to repeat yourself a lot, in different ways: using the same words a couple times inside the same sentence (I've spotted quite a few of these occurences), using the same descriptions throughout the story (how many times have you said "bony fingers"?), etc.

Watch out for typos! I've spotted a couple of mistakes such as "they're" / "there" / "their", "who's" / "whose". These are common mistakes but they can make your book look super unprofessional. It's no big deal though, a simple editing process will easily fix this.

When it comes two dialogues, there's a really weird dichotomy in place. The little pieces of dialogue and thoughts you drop here and there in the story are not always that great. I mean, they're not always introduced in the best way possible, sometimes the phrasing is a bit strange and you tend to make some of them sound quite posh. However, you're really great at writing actual dialogues. My favorite scene right after the prologue is the one where everyone is sitting in the kitchen, when they're talking about chupacabras while Maya is baking cupcakes. It was delivered in a really pleasant way and the scene was truly enjoyable. So was the one taking place in the library.

Girl, you have really good ideas. Sometimes, you manage to do amazing things with them, but sometimes, I feel like you don't really know what to do with them. I'm stating this because it's either amazing or kinda bad. Again, no middle ground in your writing style. I think it'll take some time but I'm positive you'll achieve great things and why not a writing career.

The grammar is almost flawless, which is quite impressive in my opinion. Plus you've really got something with words, and I love it.

Story and plot :

I've viturally got no complaints about the story and the plot. They're really enjoyable, and I understand that your chapters are so far introduction shots to the real action. I'm really looking forward to reading the "actual story", if you know what I mean.

Characters :

I have mixed feeling about Clove. I don't know, I can't bring myself to bond with this character. Maybe because Maya, Dolorion and Veronica are very strong and interesting characters that sometimes totally overshadow Clove. I can't pinpoint why I'm thinking of him this way, but it definitely impacted the way I read the story. I'm not sure you'd actually like to work on it, though I can't help but suggest you really consider doing so.

The way you introduce your side characters is a bit awkward sometimes. Two examples: the school scene and the library scenes. Those are definitely good ideas, but you need to work on them because the result isn't always that great.

When it comes to flashbacks, you really need to use them scarsely. They're quite long, so if you use too many of them, it'll give old photo albums vibe, and you don't really want that. Sometimes they don't blend in the actual story, so you need to pay attention to the way you connect the scene and the flashback. Actually, the flashbacks themselves are really well written and helpful to understand the characters, so I liked them.

Conclusion :

I know I've mostly pinpointed problems, but I did that to help you improve. As I said, I love this story, and I'll be sure to read it again as soon as you've learned from your mistakes and are done with the editing process. I'm really optimistic tho, I'm positive the final version will be absolute fire.

Did I like it? Yes.

Would I recommend it? As it is, I'm not sure. Once it's edited, heck yeah.