Title: QUEENLY QUEST by Ennyrogers
Source: ELGANZA, INC. | AWARDS by TheCieloCommunity
Category: Historical Fiction

Mature: N (abduction, abuse, imprisonment, infertility, slavery)

LGBTQIAP+: N
Status: Ongoing
Special note (judging): I had four books in this category, and the other judges (Karuar and Lunatic_Twilight) had four and three books, respectively.
Result: 66/100

Clicking the "External Link" button below the "Continue to next part" button will take you straight to the book, or click the link in the inline comments here. → 

*****

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: 66/100

Title: 4/5
Royalty and quests are surefire ways to catch my attention, so I love the content of this title. My only (nitpicky) thing is the capitalization. I prefer only capitalizing the first letter of each word.

Cover: 5/5
Yep. Nice and simple. Image of a queen (presumably), artsy title in a legible font at a size that's readable, simple author's name. And it's so pretty. Props to sugararmy07 for a beautiful design.

Blurb: 5/5
I love this blurb. I can't find anything wrong with it (do you know how rare that is?), and it strikes the perfect balance of information and mystery, piquing the reader's interest so they dive into the story. Romance, intrigue, unknown powers—I can't wait to get into this.

Plot & storytelling: 5/15
So, my first observation here is that the blurb is misleading. There's a heavy emphasis on what happens after Helena marries the prince, but by the end of chapter 14, she hasn't even met the prince yet, let alone married him. I'm sure the events in the blurb will happen, but that tiny little sentence about her coming from humble beginnings does not set the expectation that this story will begin with her life as a normal girl living in a village. If anything, it sets up a prologue situation with a brief background about her humble beginnings. I definitely recommend reevaluating the blurb because of this.

As for the plot itself, I'm liking it so far, but there are a lot of inconsistencies. Forgotten or dropped information is pretty common, and that leads to abrupt transitions, because something important does not carry over from one scene to the next.

In chapter two, Helena's mother tells her the truth about her origins—and then Helena immediately forgets all about it. There is no mention of it in any of the following chapters. That should weigh heavily on Helena's mind, especially with the strange nightmares and apparent hallucinations she's experiencing, but she doesn't even think about it once.

When she reflects on her past with Asher, she recalls him kissing her, and she acknowledges his romantic interest in her is more than what she feels for him, but she wants a romance to bloom between them. Later, she asks Tiffany if Asher likes her. She already knows he does. She said so herself. Why is she asking this?

It makes no sense when Helena, Tiffany, and Asher are so freaked out about the king's summons until we get an explanation in the next chapter about his rumored mistreatment of women. That should have come out right away when they heard the summons. But then the next day, Tiffany has lost all her fear, and so has Helena. Tiffany's excited about going to the palace, even talking about maybe marrying the prince. If everybody suspects the king of cruelty toward women, why would she expect anything different from his son? Or any men she may meet there?

When Helena gets sick and Asher helps her into bed, she's embarrassed when she wakes up the morning, because he sat up with her all night when her body was almost bare. If that was the case, why didn't it bother her before? But then she immediately forgets her embarrassment, drops the blanket, stands up, and invites him to take a bath with her. Um...?

The illness sequences make the timeline fuzzy. I had to go back through and confirm the days add up from the time she says her birthday is in one week to the time when she arrives at the palace, because it felt like it had been much longer than a week already. I think phrases like "as my birthday approached" and "one day, as we were" combined with the undefined fevered moments are a big part of the problem. They add ambiguity to the timeline and create the illusion of more time passing than actually happened. Since all of this is happening in just a handful of days, I think saying "the next day" or "two days later" would be better to reinforce the correct timeline.

Anyway, when she gets to the palace, how does she know where the stairs and the doors go? Has she been in the palace before? If not, she can't include these descriptive details. And then, when she wakes up in her room, she thinks briefly of her mother and Asher, but then she ends up in the hands of caring servants, and she suddenly forgets her fear and accepts the situation completely. She doesn't even question why she's there. A maid literally asks her, "Would you like to talk about it?" And instead of saying the obvious answer, which would be something along the lines of, "I was forcibly removed from my home and brought here against my will, and nobody has explained to me why I'm here or what's going on," she basically says, "I'm a princess now, and I'm not used to that."

How does she know she's a princess? Why does she think that? It says she's feeling at home there after a mere few hours. Really? A maid tells her, "Did you know that this place has been in our family for generations?" Does the maid's family own the palace? And Helena doesn't think about Tiffany until someone else brings up the other women brought to the palace a few days prior. Then, when she meets the other girls, she thinks, "They looked just as lost and scared as I did." But she was just chatting happily with the staff with no fear at all.

When another girl helps her escape her room at night (because the other girls still have the right priorities), Helena thinks, "Thank goodness I had stripped down to a red velvet gown I had found in one of the drawers." What does that matter? And the way they got into the tower is just mind-boggling. A girl walks up to the guards posted outside of the most heavily guarded section of the palace and says they're out for a walk, and the men simply step aside and let them pass. No questions asked.

This may be intentional on your part, but there are a lot of incongruities about female treatment in the palace. The female staff are comfortable, relaxed, and nice, which stands in direct contrast to the rumors about what happens to women in the palace, especially since those rumors are true. Partially. It seems like the female servants run the palace for the most part, and they're completely immune to the king, who gets his jollies from torturing village girls. Then, the female staff fixes the girls up and helps them recover so they can be ready the next time the king wants to play with them. It's rather twisted, if that's what's happening, because they're playing the kind nursemaids while they prepare the proverbial calf for slaughter. Lady Isabella is the only noblewoman we've met so far, and she clearly dislikes having Helena and the other village girls at the palace. The way she talks and acts around them reinforces the impression they're just playthings for the king.

Character development: 4/10
I'm having a hard time getting a handle on Helena because of all the inconsistencies. Flip-flopping about Asher, shocked by her origin and then forgetting all about it, terrified for Tiffany and then laughing with excitement alongside her about the same thing that terrified them the day before, immediately accepting the palace as her new home and losing her fear... And for all her surges of determination, a very common phrase used with her, she doesn't actually do much. She wouldn't have snuck out of her room and looked for Tiffany if that other girl hadn't come to her in the first place. With the sole exception of her abduction from her house, she never fights back, and she never protests.

The consistent characters are the side characters (except for Tiffany, who is just as contradictory as Helena). Asher, the sweet boy who clearly has a thing for Helena, is kind, caring, and protective. Helena's mother has basically the same personality as Asher. The female staff in the palace seem kind and caring, but I don't trust them, especially since they must know what the king is doing to the village girls, and they tend to the lambs until they bring them to slaughter. Lady Isabella is just a basic snob, and the king is thus far a cruel sadist. Rachel and Emily are the only characters so far strong and brave enough to take the initiative and risk their own safety to help another person.

Writing style: 7/10
Overall, your writing style is clear and readable. You have a tendency to repeat phrases and words, though, like Helena's "surge of determination" or heart racing "with fear and _____," and that can get boring or make the reader do a double-take. The following repetitions all come in twos, usually with a few paragraphs of each other:

"As we sat in my room, surrounded by fabrics and threads, _____ turned to _____ with a _____"
"I knew then that I had to _____."
Emily's cough grew worse
Rachel's eyes are sunken

Multiple speakers often speak in the same paragraph, and once, a single speaker's dialogue is split into two paragraphs. This can get confusing and make conversations hard to follow. An A B A B format is easiest to follow, where A is one speaker (and any actions they do), and B is a second speaker. Add in as many speakers as you want, as long as there is no A B A A format. When the reader sees a paragraph break and a new set of opening quotation marks, they automatically think a different person is now speaking. So, keep A's dialogue and actions together, and then, when B speaks (or performs an action), start a new paragraph, and so on.

There's one area where you show Helena's thoughts as she's thinking them (Why is this happening? What's going on?), and I'd recommend italicizing those to make them distinct from the narrative, especially since the story is in the past tense, and just like dialogue, her thoughts are in the present tense.

Sometimes, you add a period after "Mrs.", and sometimes, you don't. Both are technically correct, depending on your English usage, but it's important to pick one and stick with it throughout for consistency.

I have two last notes about very specific sentences. First, in the throne room, the king sat on a "throne-like chair." You can just say he sat on the throne, given that he is in the throne room. The only reason to not use the word "throne" is if he isn't sitting on it, but on another chair, and if so, that should be specified.

Second, this sentence: "On the wall opposite me, a large mirror seemed to reflect my image back at me, like a ghostly apparition trapped in a prison of glass." I love the imagery, but "seemed" introduces the possibility that she isn't actually seeing her reflection, so unless that's the case, you shouldn't use it here. I think you're trying to emphasize that she looks like a ghostly apparition, but you don't need "seemed" to accomplish that, because you've already nailed it at the end of the sentence.

Grammar: 7/10
Your grammar is generally solid, except for two specific areas. Most of the mistakes outside of those areas are rare enough that I think you just overlooked them in proofreading. Those are things like incomplete sentences because a word or two is missing, run-on sentences because of a missing punctuation mark, an accidental lowercase "I," extra and missing spaces, that kind of thing.

The two areas with consistent problems are verb tense and dialogue tags. First, with verb tense, the story is in the past tense, but there are occasional slips into the present tense, and it's important to stick with one to eliminate confusion. There are also some verbs that are the correct tense, but the form is wrong, like an -ing verb that should be the -ed form, or the normal form that should be the -ing form.

As for dialogue tags, these are usually incomplete sentences that come immediately after dialogue (or before) and describe who is speaking and how they're speaking. You can often identify these by phrases like "he said," "she asked," "they shouted," etc. These actually count as part of the dialogue, so the first word of the dialogue tag is technically a word in the middle of a sentence, not the beginning of a new sentence. Therefore, unless the first word of the dialogue tag is a name or other proper noun, it should be lowercase. As for the dialogue, if the closing punctuation mark would normally be a period, you have to change it to a comma to lead into the dialogue tag. There is no change for other punctuation marks.

"I had a bad dream," she said.
"What was it about?" he asked.
"I can't remember!" she exclaimed.

The sentence following dialogue is not necessarily a dialogue tag. If it's a complete sentence that can stand on its own without the dialogue, then it's probably a new sentence, so you need to capitalize the first word and end the dialogue with normal punctuation (meaning a period instead of a comma).

"I had a bad dream." She gnawed on her lip nervously.
"What was it about?" He tilted his head to the side as he looked at her.
"I can't remember!" Tears filled her eyes at the frustration.

Originality & creativity: 10/10
There's no question in this department. Everything about this story is original, and the only reason I kind of know where it's going next is because of the blurb. I still don't know how you're getting it there or what that will look like, exactly, and I definitely don't know what to think about the whole Tiffany situation. As far as descriptive detail, that sentence I quoted earlier about Helena's reflection shows how well you've nailed that.

Emotional impact: 4/10
For me to have an emotional response to a story, I need to connect with the characters, which means they need to be realistic, believable, and relatable. But since I can't get a handle on Helena, I can't connect with her, so while I can empathize from a distance, I'm not personally affected by anything that happens to her, or anybody else in the story. Smoothing out the story to make it more coherent and consistent would probably fix the problem.

Pacing & structure: 4/5
Especially at the beginning, the story felt too fast. I didn't feel like I had enough background information about Helena and what she was really like before her mother told her the truth about her origin. But after that, the pace seemed appropriate, although the timeline felt fuzzy for the reasons I discussed earlier.

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

Overall enjoyment & engagement: 6/10
I like the concept, and it's an interesting story thus far, but the incongruities bother me. I'm actually much more interested in the story as described by the blurb. The promise of royal romance and intrigue, along with a mysterious quest, is what tickles my fancy, and I know you're laying the groundwork for that to come, so I'm betting I'll get more invested as the story progresses.