All Comments on 'The Rivals Ch. 01: Dark Encounters'

Looking forward to see where this is going. The world and character building is excellent

Thanks! The next instalment is well underway.

This is great- I'm kind of glad to find it a few weeks late because it means there's more to read!

If you are not already familiar with Jen William's books, especially _The Copper Promise_ trilogy, I think you will find them right up your alley.

5 stars

This was well written. I caught one or two misspelled words but nothing that really slowed down the reading. It was good that you explained the original terms where appropriate in a natural way that didn't stop the story.

Lacking a fancy fantasy art book cover to tell the reader what to expect, maybe a very short summary or intro before the diving into the story just to set the stage a bit? Fantasy can go a number of ways so a little bit of "you are here" would have helped me at the beginning. That's just being picky though, a few paragraphs in and I was fine.

I'll just say straight away that I definitely enjoyed the tail, although I'll also say in the interest of full disclosure that I'm evenly split between this being a 4 and a 5- - although I will not put a vote on it until I read chapter 2 first: I'm going to need to do that because maybe it will pick up where this leaves off in such a way that it will convince me one way or the other about which of the two numbers to assign this chapter. But I'll get on with the rest of the review.

***

I certainly saw nothing worthy of why that one person was that rated it 1. You built the suspense up well; you engaged us with a plausible setting; you introduced both characters well and at appropriate times; you certainly gave us more than enough information about both for us to know why they were there what their backgrounds were, Etc ... so all of the necessary building blocks exist for a good story --and I think it was a very good one! Certainly with your female lead she was plucky, intelligent, snarky and very capable of defending herself. Your male counterpart was certainly very educated, had every reason to be there, and certainly presented the opposite side of the coin from the woman and although it's clear she's intelligent but not as formally educated, she's very observant, and she doesn't miss much. This is what makes for some really cute, snarky and very entertaining interactions between the two of them. So you certainly gain many points in my book for creating characters people can enjoy if they're willing to sit down and read this. If I were to have summarized this using a title, I would have titled it like this: Indiana Jones meets Xena!

After reading chapter 2, I concluded there was no narrative shortfall at the end of this one since I was originally thinking that there might have been some necessary transition lacking? What I mean is that my original thinking was this chapter may have benefited from I wouldn't be able to say how many more words, but I would be able to say that it could have given us some type of detail as to where your female character would be going and where the male character would be riding off to and then creating a firmer foundation to whet our appetites for the next time that they meet. See what I'm talking about? So to get to the point, this chapter also rated a 5.