Full title: Beyond the Veil of Yonder by XannaLurel
Series: Beyond the Veil of Yonder (book one)
Source: ELGANZA, INC. | AWARDS by TheCieloCommunity
Category: Adventure
Mature: Y (animal death, blood, classism, death, decapitation, dubious consent, emotional abuse, gore, loss of a loved one, mentions of rape and torture, mild profanity, non-explicit sexual content, physical abuse, sexual abuse, sexual references, violence, war)
LGBTQIAP+: N

Status: Ongoing
Special note (judging): I had five books in this category, and the other judges (TJDW1989 and bangtanrewinds) had four and one books, respectively.
Result: 96/100

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*****

Rubric:
- Title: 5
- Book cover: 5
- Description (blurb): 5
- Plot & storytelling: 15
- Character development: 10
- Writing style: 10
- Grammar: 10
- Originality & creativity: 10
- Emotional impact: 10
- Pacing & structure: 5
- Accuracy (if non-fiction): 5
- Overall enjoyment & engagement: 10
Total: 100

*****

Total: 96/100

Title: 5/5
This has a mystical, fantastical feel to it which I love.

Cover: 4/5
This cover is as elegant as the title. I love the mystery of the arch and the winding pathway through all the greens, and the color scheme you used for the solid banner and the text is perfect, as is your font style choice. I think your name should be a bit bigger, though, as it's hard to make out from the title page, and if you bump that up a notch or two, you'll probably want to bump up "Book 1" to maintain the same ratio between their sizes. But otherwise, this is gorgeous. It looks like a cover for a book I'd find in a bookstore.

Blurb: 4/5
I like short blurbs that leave plenty to the imagination, and this is one of those blurbs. I also like the contrasting statements to start it off, but I'd tweak the second line a little to match the established present tense better. He "has" faced would do it, I think, and now that I'm looking at it more, I think I'd change the semicolon to a comma and move "while" up from the third line to the second one (while she was). I think "but" would work better in the third line, anyway, and that would be a nice progression for these lines as well (she's [she is], she was, but she, and she). In my mind, anyway.

Fantasy adventure with time travel, complicated romance, clashing worldviews, and so much more? Count me in! Those quotes of reader comments are really compelling, too, because they're not professional or official. They're real people who actually like the story. Now, I'm getting excited about reading this!

Plot & storytelling: 14/15
I love this. So, so much. You grabbed me and pulled me well before I even got into the story, and then it only got better. And better. And better. This is so, so well done. From the moment we meet Elizabeth and Dan walking through the park in our world to the (as of me writing this) last chapter, where Niamh listens to William and Edward talking in a house in the fairy lands, everything just flows. It's smooth, it's nearly flawless, the progression is logical and natural, and although a lot has to happen between Elizabeth being trapped in a toxic relationship in our world and her sitting down to have tea with a fairy while listening to the story of an attractive, enigmatic knight's life, it all makes sense. The third-person perspective allows you to shift from omniscient narrator with a detached worldview to intimate close-ups of the individual thoughts and feelings of various characters without pesky POV changes, and you never need annoying headings to tell the reader the character, location, or time, because it's all in the text. Content issues like gore, violence, and sexual references are tastefully done, descriptive but not gratuitous, realistic and not romanticized.

The way you handled William's background story was just perfect. So often, authors try to have one character tell the story to another in dialogue form, but the dialogue turns into an info dump that is very clearly a narrative story inserted between quotation marks. It's not natural, a person wouldn't give that much detail (or know that much detail, for that matter), and it hinders the flow of the story instead of helping it. Setting this up with Niamh and Elizabeth having tea and then breaking away from them to let the narrator tell the story in the next chapter provides the necessary explanation for how Elizabeth learns about it without having to worry about how Niamh could possibly know such-and-such detail. And then you wrap it up very neatly by bringing it back to Niamh's dialogue so she can return us to the present.

That's really how you give all the background info. Maybe Elizabeth doesn't get cutaway chapters, but she doesn't need them, and you're fully capable of unfolding her backstory gradually and within the context of this story. Everything in this story unfolds like a flower. The world, the people, the lore, the mystery, the romance. Everything.

I have three tiny critiques. First, when Elizabeth asks William about the execution, she repeats the question "How did he turn into it?" twice, with only a paragraph of William's dialogue in between, I believe. She's clearly asking something different the second time, because William's response is different (and not the obvious "I just answered that!"), but the question is the same (except "it" becomes "one," as I recall). So tweaking one of those questions would probably be a good idea.

Much later, there's this sentence: "She froze on the spot, sensing that their presence was less welcome than William had claimed, that it would be a safe place." The last part doesn't make sense. The apparent noun to which "that" is referring seems to be "their presence," but I think you're trying to say their presence wasn't welcome, and it wasn't the safe place he'd claimed, so some rewording there is in order.

And, finally, when Niamh is describing Valtharia, the text says, "To the west lay the vast and uncharted Sapphire Sea," but it's to the east on the map.

Side note: I'm so glad you provided the website for mapmaking, because I will need that very soon for a couple of my stories, and I wasn't looking forward to trying to draw things with my limited artistic ability.

Character development: 10/10
Elizabeth's character development is absolutely stellar. Her growth from the woman who recognizes the toxicity of her relationship with Dan but is too weak-willed to stand up to his manipulation into the woman who can laugh in his face when he tries one of his veiled insults is slow, steady, and perfect. The glimpses of who she was before she met him become more and more frequent until she becomes that person again, and the person she was when she was with him is nothing but a mere memory. I love how she's supposed to be the "immature" and "irresponsible" one, according to him, but she's the one who talks to William when they're initially captured and imprisoned while Dan sulks like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Her gradual warming to William and distancing from Dan occurs slowly and naturally until Dan almost fades out of the picture completely.

I love a good slow burn romance like this one. The mysteries surrounding William aren't enough to keep Elizabeth away, because she sees people more clearly than the selfish, suspicious Dan ever could. She sees the little kindnesses William does for them and his natural protectiveness of others, and it is that she responds to first, over and above his physical appeal. While there are descriptions of his appearance earlier in the story, the emphasis is on what he does and says, and that's why her attraction toward him grows until, later, she can't help but notice even more details of his rugged handsomeness.

William is not the typical knight-in-shining-armor type. He's a battle-hardened, emotionally and mentally scarred character, fully dedicated to protecting others. I was hoping when this story began there would be a scene where he finally took Dan to task about his treatment of Elizabeth, but he stands back and lets the couple handle their own affairs, all while treating Elizabeth with respect and dignity, which empowers her to stand up for herself. That seems to be his way. He's not one to jump into the middle of things and take over. He does what he needs to do, quietly and expecting nothing in return, and then he steps aside and returns to his solitude in the background. I'll be interested to see how his relationship with Elizabeth develops, because while the effect she's having on him is definitely there, it's much slower and much less apparent than her growth. It will take a lot to bring his walls down and coax him into opening up.

Dan. Well. I think everybody can agree from the first chapter that he's unlikeable, and I would still love to see William cut him down to size. He will be a problem. I'm sure of it. He's too self-absorbed and insecure without Elizabeth around to prop him up, so he'll have to find some way to make himself feel better, and I can see a revenge angle in the future from him allying with the bad guys. Whoever they may be.

And those are just the main three characters thus far. There are many, many more, like Ciaran, Niamh, Edward, Cathleen, Owain, and they're all distinct, complete, complex, memorable characters.

Writing style: 9/10
You have a very clean, professional, descriptive writing style. It's just gorgeous. Your imagery touches on all the senses, and there is never any confusion about action. I know what happened in that scene. And every other scene. I don't have to scroll back up, or click back to the last chapter, or scratch my head, puzzling it out. It's all there.

Because of how polished your writing is, double punctuation marks (?!) feel really, really out of place to me. I don't usually like them, anyway, because I think it's better to incorporate the detail about how shocked so-and-so was about such-and-such into the dialogue tag rather than rely on punctuation to give the intended meaning. You don't struggle with detail in your dialogue tags, nor do you overuse question marks and exclamation marks in the slightest. So, you don't need to pair them up for added emphasis. For me, seeing double punctuation feels informal, and I just don't think it fits into the tone and style of this story.

There are occasional paragraphs that I think should be divided, especially when the third or so sentence in the paragraph begins with "One day" or "Once." Those are starting lines, not middle lines. The preceding lines are typically generalized descriptions for scene transition, and I think it would work better to start a new paragraph with the shift into the specific "One day." Similarly, there are some instances of dialogue at the beginning of a paragraph, followed by the actions or thoughts of someone other than the speaker, or even a larger group. I think it would be better to start a new paragraph when the perspective changes from the speaker to another person.

There are two or three times where one person's dialogue is split into two paragraphs for no apparent reason, and in those instances, I think it would be better to put it all in one paragraph. Typically, I see a sentence, a dialogue tag, and then the next sentence of dialogue starts a new paragraph. But with no change in topic or tone, I think it should all stay in the same paragraph.

Grammar: 10/10
I didn't find a single SPAG error in the entire book, which is so ridiculously rare that I don't know what to do with myself right now. I feel like I should give you extra points here, except I don't give 10s in this category unless there were zero mistakes, so that number is already a huge achievement.

Originality & creativity: 10/10
There are elements within this plot that I've seen before. Wandering down the wrong path and ending up in another world. The battle-hardened knight and the innocent, naïve girl. The unexplained curse or disease ravaging the people. Hidden kingdoms where fairies or other mythical races/species live. An unexpected quest to save humanity. But there's nothing cliché about this story. The depth of your characters, the intricacy of a world that needs a map for readers to follow along, the unique horror of the bloodfiends - every single detail of this is completely original to you. And let's not forget your exquisite descriptions, which showcase your fabulous creativity. The images you include are beautiful, but they're not a substitute for the written word, and they're not meant to be. They just show the reader what you literally just described, bringing the mental picture you painted to the physical realm.

Emotional impact: 10/10
This is an interesting category, because your writing style often has the feel of a detached, omniscient narrator, so the emotional aspect is not as overt as it is in a more personal, immersive first person dive into a specific character's mind. But you do portray emotions, and you do take the reader into your characters, who are relatable, believable, and thus empathetic individuals. Elizabeth gets the most attention in this area, but even Dan's inner world is on display. He's a person with insecurities, just like everybody else, and while his tactics of manipulation and control are despicable, they mark him as a real person, too. And the way you can build the tension over several chapters until the moment of horror when the bloodfiend breaks into Ciaran's house! Getting the reader to feel what you want them to feel in the moment is one thing. Getting them there ahead of time with subtle word choice and a sentence of foreboding here or there makes that brief, heart-pounding encounter all the more real.

Pacing & structure: 5/5
There may be people who say this is too slow, but I disagree. It's perfect. You're not dragging anything along. You're simply taking your time to develop the characters and the world naturally, keeping the pace up with new information and continuous action throughout, even if that action is just exploring a fairy garden. Every chapter division makes sense, as does the chronology of the story.

Accuracy (if non-fiction): 5/5
Free points. Yay! 🙂

Overall enjoyment & engagement: 10/10
Ahem.

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I love this. You have no idea how much I love this. I wasn't super excited about the reading time when I was preparing for judging, but as soon as I sat down to evaluate the cover, title, and blurb, I knew I was in for a winner. The reading time did not matter anymore, and I read faster than expected, anyway, because I loved the story so much, I couldn't stop reading. Actually, I started checking the chapter count and thinking, "Aw. Only 32 chapters?" Because I wanted more. And I still want more. The rest of the book and the rest of the series. Now. Please. 😉

Fantasy, romance, adventure, quest, and a male love interest who hits all my preferences*? Yes. Also, kudos for including music from The Elder scrolls IV: Oblivion in the playlist. A wise choice. And just another reason to love this book. I also approve of the Celtic music.

*If you'd like to know, mature, cold, distant, secretive, protective, chivalrous, gentle, will probably warm up to be the sweetest boyfriend ever.