Vae Victis: woe to the vanquished.
Will you be defeated?
Enter my arena, where you'll find brutal honesty, blunt critiques and epidermic reaction to what you call writing.
No way for me to be mean early on, I like your title.
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Cover
I don't really like the boy in the middle. It gives a teen-fiction feeling to your fantasy story. Note that even if it was a teen-fiction, I wouldn't like it more.
The background and the dragon shape in the smoke are fine (even if it took me some time to figure out the dragon).
The main problem of your cover is that I couldn't read the text without squinting like I was sucking on a lemon. Only your name is readable clearly. It's a pity considering the nice font you used and the light effect.
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Blurb
Using a quote from the story = bad idea. I know that you wanted to do like on the back of a real book, when they use a distinctive font to catch the reader eye with a profound quote, but I always thought it was cheezy. Furthermore, here, anything after "go back" is just unnecessary. If you want to keep the quote, keep only the first part, way more powerful on itself. But then again, cheezy.
You're my first review and I said I will focus on the story itself, but you should get a strike for the "normal guy". Wattpad is full of blurbs with ordinary girls and normal boys. It makes me sigh, roll my eyes and want to throw my PC against a wall. What does it even mean, normal?
I see that you hate your summary. I do too. I do too, because it IS a summary, and not a blurb. you're telling way too much and it doesn't make me want to read your story, because I know what will happen already. It's also poorly written with past, present and future tense all blended together. Please do better, you need to.
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Not a chapter
I tried to be nice but I can't anymore. Not with your first chapter. I just read your summary-blurb. I don't need to read it again. And if people skipped it, you don't need to force feed it to them. They open your book already! They already want to read the story, so give them the actual story.
STRIKE!
I hate castings, pure and simple. You're a writer, so write about your chharacters, don't give me a picture of how they look. When I read a book, I create my own mental picture of people and places from what the writer gives me (and it's sometimes ruined by TV or movie adaptations). If you want your characters to look exactly like celebrities (which I think is a bad idea in the first place), use words!
STRIKE!
In your foreword, about the characters, I know you are the writer but how do you know how your readers will love your characters? Don't tell me how to feel, make me!
And I just don't understand the director's cut you'll reserve for the published version. I like your determination to be published, but either I'm about to read a story that is not complete and that won't make much sense, or the deleted scenes are not essential and you just don't need them (in that case they are fillers, and you don't want fillers). No strike for that but a massive raised eyebrow.
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Prologue
You really test your readers' patience. Mine anyway. If I can skip your prologue(s), they are unnecessary. Period. I write this without having read them, but my opinion so far is don't use any of the two prologues you wrote. Each part of your story, each sentence, even, must have a purpose.
Sorry but STRIKE!
Great first line! Powerful and intriguing. Don't delay it with forewords and castings and self-doubt!
In your prologue you say that Jehanne will have enough time and energy to get her job done, but her job seems to be protecting the stone. And she has no idea how to do that as she has no strategy yet.
Inconsistency. STRIKE!
Your text lacks of commas, especially in long, complex sentences.
The part about Isabel going alone in the forest, supposedly to kill a dragon on her own because a larger group of people would be killed doesn't make sense. Killed by what exactly? Is there some danger in the forest you don't talk about? And has Isabel warned anyone she was going alone? If not, men will go out in the forest anyway, making her solo-mission useless. And lastly, why would she ever do that???
I don't buy it. STRIKE!
And you're out !
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Conclusion
I didn't read much of your story so far and that's a shame. It's definitely not the worst thing I read on Wattpad but I wish I could get more into the actual story. Go more to the point, not only in your text and dialogue, but also in your book as a whole.
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