ECHOES OF THE SWORD’S SONG

C.L. Frontera

This is an ambitious novel, with an interesting set of characters and a story-line which has a number of intriguing twists and turns. The switches from scene to scene are handled adroitly, without any danger of the reader forgetting one set of characters while reading about others.

I note that this material consists of only two chapters, the first being very short and the second very long. Because you constantly shift the reader’s attention from one character and background to another I wonder whether you need chapters at all or whether the breaks which you indicate with asterisks are not sufficient.

You obviously love words, and you paint scenes effectively and there are some good images and similes. It’s also a pleasure to find a writer who can spell and punctuate, though as far as grammar is concerned I would quarrel with you in one or two places: ‘By Alarsin law, the ruling city of the Kingdom of Ensullon, she was...’ would be better as ‘By the law of Alarsin, the ruling city...’ so that the adjectival phrase is attached to ‘Alarsin’ rather than to ‘law’; ‘Arlee obsessed about’ – I don’t think you can use ‘obsessed’ in this way – at least, you can, but I don’t think you should, and I would suggest that you change it to ‘was obsessed’; I also don’t much care for ‘defended’ as an attribution in ‘Terin defended with clenched fists’; as for ‘Feeding off of Anna’s fear’, oh, dear Ms or Mr Frontera, no, no, no, no, no! – ‘off’ is quite sufficient by itself and the added ‘of’ is sloppy and ugly and shouldn’t be used in everyday speech, let alone in the text of a novel. You may think these points to be unimportant niggles, but there are a few editors left who care fervently about good usage, so why not make the changes so that they and pedants like me will not be affronted?

You rightly begin your story with a dramatic paragraph which grabs the reader’s attention. However, it is a pity that the next paragraph introduces a needle, because my first thought was that Anna had pricked herself, even though you were talking about far more blood than a needle-prick would produce. This may seem another pretty trivial comment, but I think it is quite important – you don’t want to confuse your reader from the start. Apart from this point the first paragraph is clever as well as dramatic, because it plants in the reader’s mind the idea that Anna might not be what she seems.

Your characters are all very clearly portrayed, which means that they are believable – although I must say that I thought King Jarrell was a bit too stupid to be true – and your scenes are set clearly and most of the dialogue sounds very natural.

However, I feel quite strongly that even in the sections where the action is rapid, the pace of the narrative is slower than it should be. I would suggest that this material is in fairly urgent need of cutting. Take out anything which is not essential – a word here, a phrase there, a sentence or a whole paragraph – it will give your prose much more sparkle. (Incidentally, you are not alone in your tendency to overwrite – almost all authors do it = and the advice to cut appears in nearly all the comments I write on the submissions I read for YWO.)

There is one other major point to make, and this concerns the rhythm of your prose. Have you read your work aloud? The ear is a much better editor than the eye. If you read your work aloud (or, better, get someone to read it to you) your ear will often tell you what your eye has not noticed. This can apply to all kinds of things, but in this case it is that with few exceptions, you use short sentences of the same rhythmic pattern throughout the pages you have submitted. Although this technique works quite well in fast-moving passages such as the reactions of the Ensullons when the Skelund invaders are first sighted and the scene when Anna is packing to leave home, even then one or two more complex sentences will give the prose the variety which at present it lacks. In many cases, it would merely be a matter of linking two sentences with a conjunction such as ‘and’ or ‘but’.

Of much less importance than what I have already said are a number of other points:

I think it a pity that the relationship between Anna and Terin as described in the first pages is so unpleasant. I don’t think you can do much about Terin – she is a well-drawn teenager – but since Anna is a joint heroine of the story, I wonder whether you might not make her a little more tolerant of Terin’s obsession with the Swordmistress. It would not mean changing the scene when she slaps Terin, but you could perhaps let her be more remorseful than at present after the event. You might also alter the earlier paragraph beginning ‘Her daughter, Terin, hadn’t come home yet’ to make her sound a little more understanding.

Be careful about putting the reader wise. Terin says, ‘The Swordmistress was the bravest woman in Ensullon’s history. She won the Bendarian Border War.’ The reader needs to know this, but surely Anna, whether or not she is the Swordmistress, already knows it, just as all the people of Ensullon do, so Terin wouldn’t say that. You might solve the problem by letting Terin say, ‘You seem to forget that the Swordmistress...’ The same sort of problem arises when Terin tells Arlee what is happening – surely Arlee is not so thick that she wouldn’t have worked it out for herself, and, incidentally, why does Terin not tell her these things until ‘After hours on the road’?

When Randolf attacks Terin, he asks, ‘Is the daughter like her mother?’ But at this point in the story, although Gabby is soon going to give your readers the strongest possible hint, I don’t think you want them to know yet that Anna is the Swordmistress.

I hesitate to say that I find the names of the characters rather irritating, although I accept that this style of name goes with the genre. But isn’t it a little strange to have one of the two main characters with an ordinary name like Anna, while everyone else has a fantasy name (apart I suppose from Randolf, the only eccentricity of which is the ‘f’ rather than ‘ph’)?

Although I seem to have found quite a lot to criticise, I did enjoy reading your story, and I think both you and it have a lot of potential. I wish you luck.

Michael Legat