The Gauntlet: Results and Reviews

Frost on the Grasslands by SmokeAndOranges

Final Total: 5 (reshelved)

Reader 1:

Cover: 2/4 Oh what a pretty font! The words in this - rather long - title are squished together too close, and they seem to have some odd spacing between letters (look at the double S in Grassland, or RI in Stories, for example), but the font is lovely. It doesn't really work for the authors name, though, because you have the capital letters in the middle of the word and it looks uneven and awkward.

If I may suggest, stretch your title more - heightwise - give your words space to breathe. You have overcrowded the top of the cover with nothing to really balance it out at the bottom.

The image is a bit dark but well chosen, fits the title well, and the fact that it is dark makes the title stand out.

I don't think you really need to add the part which says "Volume 1". You wouldn't really see that on covers for serialised novels (look at Game of Thrones, or Lord of the Rings), and it makes your long title seem even longer and more daunting. It also takes up valuable cover space which could be used better (hint - to increase space between your words, again.)

Title: 1.5/2  I quite like it. It feels very high fantasy/adventure. It's a bit on the long side, though.

Blurb: 1/4 There is clearly a story there, but this is written in such a confusing way that I'm not sure if I'm getting it.

Let's start from the top:

In your first sentence, what I assume is the tagline - I understand what you are trying to say, but it's not at all clear. This is often the issue with taglines. You try to get some sort of a hook within a short sentence and end up just confusing your readers. Maybe try removing *itself* from the second part of the line? Simplify it to "when history erased the stage"? Or "when the stage has been erased from history"? I think the issue here is that the word *stage* appears at the very end, where it no longer naturally links to the *stories* from the first part, and also the fact that you are referring to history as a conscious being.

"Winter the Mountainair..." - this sentence is a bit long. Try splitting it. You are giving us too much information here to be still informative. The part about the war should really be its own separate part. Then - if she's the queen and the tyrant, why is she lying low? Did she lose the war? How is she acting strangely? Is it only because she is moving south to escape the cold? If that is the case, then it should be her enemies following her, not the other way around, because if she is acting strangely than it shouldn't be reactionary.

In the next paragraph, you jump into a whole new set of characters, and I guess these are the actual characters we will be following? If yes, then it would have been better to start with them, rather than the back story. Nobody really likes to have an explanatory narration spoon feeding them a story, and that holds true for blurbs as it does for movies and books.

Here, you might also want to rethink some of your sentences, try reading them aloud or using a program to read them out to you. Some of it reads really awkwardly and takes a few tries to get the point. An example of this: *than Winter or his clan* I presume that the *his* is Whipper, but it reads as if Winter is a he, but since she's a queen, well, that doesn't follow. Again, here you throw a lot of information - wiped out species, traitors, runaways. In the entire blurb you have a lot of plots and subplots going, and I would suggest you focus on the main one and go with that, leaving your readers to discover the rest as they read.

Finally: you use the word *stories* throughout as a way of reminding us that these are all connected and together will solve some sort of a riddle. I can see what you are trying to do here, but it doesn't work as well as you might hope.