The elementalists- expiration_date

 Review by OutspokenGirl612

The Title  (3/5)

I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but you should put on capital letter the first letter of each word and erase the period there. As for the title itself, it has total relevance, and keeping it simple is great for your story.

Description and Foreword(10/10)

Great description; by adding some sort of background to the story, you’ve given the reader an idea of the scenario so he/she can decide if it’s appealing enough. The segment of the foreword is totally nice as well; by describing a bit of what the girl is doing and leaving it in suspense you catch the reader. It’s great as well that you decided to use an action fragment, it works better than a descriptive one when trying to attract readers.

Plot and Originality(27/30)

The plot is definitely something I haven’t seen before, it really is good and well thought of. I can see that you have done research to prepare it well. Be careful on mixing different folkloric stories from around the world; don’t forget to state, either in the final chapter, or at the end of every chapter, where you took the ideas from; it’s always fun for readers to be able to read the original story and appreciate the changes or ways you apply it.  Still, the plot is a bit confusing, I’m going to attribute that to the fact that the story is still starting, but you should try to make it a bit clearer in the next chapters.

Characterization(18/20)

The characters are well built; you gave much thought to them. I like how, through casual conversations and actions, you show more information about them and their personality and background. The Princess and Kai need to appear soon, though, cause all the attention has been on the Prince and Yamir.

Writing Style and Language(18/25)

Your use of vocabulary is good, as well as using other languages and adding the meanings for the readers to understand. However, I found some mistakes, mostly because of the mix of different languages’ grammar structure.

Chapter 1:

1. long lashes eyes- You should put it as long-lashed eyes, because you’re using the lashes as a description, so you must convert the noun into an adjective.

2. She sipped from a ceramic cup as well, her slender fingers wrapped around the smooth surface, unlike the boy, who was clutching an identical cup, his thick fingers wrapped around the small container with a single hand.- That’s a really long sentence, you have a lot of commas there. But you can fix it by changing one of those to a semi-colon: She sipped from a ceramic cup as well, her slender fingers wrapped around the smooth surface; unlike the boy, who was clutching an identical cup, his thick fingers wrapped around the small container with a single hand.

3.. A large tree provided shade with its emerald colored leaves and thick branches, one which held a swing fit for a small child, which was adorned with flames carved into the dark wood coming from an intricate dragon, which was a bit more striking than it was beautiful.- Once again a sentence that’s way too long, you need to divide it. Also, you repeat too many times “which”, you have to fix that: A large tree provided shade with its emerald colored leaves and thick branches. One held a swing fit for a small child, which was adorned with flames carved into the dark wood, coming from an intricate dragon that was a bit more striking than it was beautiful.

4.  There are some typos through the chapter; unnecessary spaces in some paragraphs; make sure to fix them..

5. In paragraph eight you have a small typo with one apostrophe; at the end of one of the dialogues you used the wrong one.

6. Every time a character quotes another character inside his dialogue, you should use the simple apostrophe, which is intended for that. Example: Sara couldn’t stop talking, “I was so embarrassed, but she kept saying ‘hottie alert’ in such as phony voice! So I just told her ‘stop being ridiculous’ and she got mad at me.”  *Go back to proofread, so you can fix those.

Chapter 2:

1. He carefully eyed the woman in front of him, as not to catch her eye. – Add a “so” before the “as” and it will be fixed.

2. I apologize for that once again Yamir-sshi.- Whenever something is being said to a person and the speaker decides to add the name, it must always be preceded by a comma or else it could lose the meaning intended. For example: a) I was walking Nora. (This can be interpreted as escorting the person somewhere.) b) I was walking, Nora. (Now the person is telling “Nora” what he was doing.)

Chapter 3:

1. You forgot to put the foreign word “tóngzhì” in italics.

2. (…) he was a bit older than I- If you want to use “I” you have to add “am” afterwards; if not, then you have to change it to “me.”

3. (…) unlike me so is so uptight (…)- Change the first “so” to “who.”

Chapter 4:

1.  If you are adding Chinese words, you have to add the tones in every single one or either in none, but you have to be consistent with that.

*You change formats in the chapters, there are different font sizes and paragraph arrangements; try to keep all of them in the same format, it gets bothersome to the eye to see those constant changes.

**By the way you use the sentence structure I can sense that your main language is one of the romantic languages: Spanish? French perhaps? Maybe I’m mistaken, but since my native language is Spanish I can see the resemblance in the sentence structure. Because of this, my greatest advice is for you to remember that from one language to another, there are great variations. Whether Spanish, for example, uses long sentences, English favors short, direct ones. In English is best to stick to being a bit more blunt, giving the action first and details following, not the other way around like in Latin derived languages.

Flow(7/10) 

The flow is ok, not too fast, not too slow. Although, I must mention that the long sentences do keep it from being more enjoyable. Try to make them shorter from now on.

Total (83/100)

Here’s the review! Sorry it took so long! Remember to credit!

Keep up the good work! ^^