Reflections - Review Requests

39. The Witch's Way (TO)

Author: italychick

Reviewer: TBJess

Genre: The Otherworldly

Cover and Title

The cover is magnificently done,  the text an eye-catching focal point and the color scheme complementing the gold nicely.  The title is very pertinent to the story and not cliché in the least.

Overall Review

Filled with strong characters, annoying villains,  and top-notch world-building,  The Witch's Way is a fast-paced novel with a gripping plot all fantasy connoisseurs should read.  Kicking it off with a distinct dialect,  you've blazed a whole new path of first-person storytelling, shattering clichés in the first few sentences.  Your grammar is on-point, with very few typos and great sentence structure.  Aside from a few tense shifts scattered about,  your story, from a grammatical standpoint,  is near perfect.

Moving on to your characters,  they're clearly well developed. Speaking as a whole,  everyone in your story is unique with their own personality. Take Gwyn (even though she's the MC, she's my favorite character), a strong,  temperamental and passionate thief,  too clever for her own sanity, has just the amount of sass to make me cheer her on,  enough internal and external problems to relate with her,  and realistic flaws to get her into trouble. Her relationship with Wren is impeccable,  taking a stereotypical, almost bad-boy-like-but-cheeky vibe, and meshing it together with Gwyn's  fiery attitude, is pure magic.  The reason why? Because they're friends. It was a nice balance between something cliché and originality--that even though Wren was only present in one chapter,  you did such an awesome job representing his personality. All in all,  you made some good calls.

Then we come to the villains. There's King Iain, who obviously doesn't take too kindly to witches (though at the moment Gwyn hasn't had any direct encounters with him,  there certainly is some buildup occurring that'll stir up some conflict in the future) and there's Nim-- a soulless, pompous, god-like beast who's bone-crushingly annoying. My goodness,  I  swear he can't become any more irksome than he already is...can he? Tying Gwyn to a tree like some kind of animal? He needs to be knocked down a notch, and deserved being shoved into the waterfall  *spoiler alert.

My point is,  you've done an excellent job with getting your audience to dislike him.  However,  I did notice a possible pattern you were falling into,  that could lead into a cliché which I'll go into more detail later.

The plot is quite intriguing. Gwyn isn't the Chosen One destined to fulfill some prophecy.  Rather,  it's driven out of necessity to help a friend,  and at this point,  assist a certain villain through the woods...sigh.  There's not much else I can comment on the plot besides some political tensions brewing, especially because of Gwyn and Nim's rendezvous with the  guards.

One thing I will point out though is your lengthy author's note.  Filled with terms from Gwyn's world,  it's a very long list.  It was tedious to read,  and being quite forgetful,  I often found myself bouncing back and forth between the chapter I was reading and the author's note.  My suggestion would be to divide the list into each chapter (or section),  listing  the terms relevant in each one for better readers' ease and comprehension.

Clichés

You managed to break and balance many clichés so far.  There's only one major cliché I could detect at this point,  and that's Nim and Gwyn's relationship.  As far as I can tell,  it's set up as a typical love-hate scenario. Already,  I see them coming to especially when Gwyn tells Nim her name. Now,  I'm not sure if you're planning to make them fall in love, but it's cliché so I'm inclined to point it out. If they do, executed properly (which I'm certain you can do given the excellent work you've exhibited), cliché or no,  it can be an epic tale.

Overall Notes

Everything overall is great! Keep up the awesome work and  I wish you the best of luck writing!