Book: Dead Beginnings by BriannaRoseC

Judge: Sammy

For: Mystic Awards 2018

The books cover is really nice. The purple rose really suits the whole dead theme you get from the title. The description makes you want to read it, but the third part of it can be polished up a bit.

The plot was explained pretty much by the third chapter. The pace of the story is perfect, but the chapters are a bit up and down. Sometimes boring, sometimes interesting. And the editing isn't bad, but there definitely is room for improvement. I would recommend the writer to first proof read your work, then make your necessary changes before publishing. Cause where some people can look past those kind of mistakes, others will make sure that you know, you made a mistake.

Grammar is the biggest issue of this book. Multiple times I saw misplaced and missed quotations, and missing commas as well. And their sentences have words at the end of them that don't even make any sense. The characters' pov is in bold so that is obviously told out, and with the movement of setting, it was fine until after the whole carriage scene. I didn't even know where they were or how long it took them to get there, and that was personally very frustrating.

Creativity is performed really good in this story. The whole idea in the first place is really unique and not thought of. And the whole Prince/Princess of Death thing may be cliché, but it's how the writer pulled it off that impressed me. Also they did stick through their given roles so that was nice.

The characters are nice, but they can be a bore at times. Their whole status is really cool and all, but the whole darkness thing can get a bit overbearing at times. And this book needs side characters, badly. Either their own species, or even one of the half breeds, add them in to make the story more interesting.