Generations?
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Professional Book Critique

Guardian Book Critique Notes for author Clive Osborne Rapley

Narrative Flow
Overall I think you have produced a very well written and marketable book, and I definitely think you should submit it to a traditional publishing house (or consider self-publishing if you choose that path). The story pulls the reader into the action and into the characters’ hearts and lives from the first page on, and that pace is kept throughout the entire book. I could sense that you as an author have an intuitive understanding of human nature, and that comes through in your character portrayals. Each one of your characters is believable and interesting on many levels.

Also effective is the way you portray the beautiful, elf-like aliens, the Dacians, as the ones who are actually cruel and vicious, and yet the scary-looking, ugly, reptilian Mylians are the innocent, enslaved, victimized ones. This upheaval of typical assumptions made about creatures and beings in books and movies, and in readers’ minds, is well done.

I love the way you also use this sort of reverse logic in portraying how each race sees the other race as alien; excellent statement on the typical “us vs. them” mentality.

Your descriptions are so vivid as to make the reader feel as though he or she is right in the center of the action. I especially loved this in Chapter 4, “Shipwrecked.” Your descriptions of the intimate scenes between Tristan and Aurelia are skillfully and beautifully done, so well done in fact that readers who might be a bit on the shy side, or reserved and conservative will still be drawn into the scenes without feeling awkward reading about them. I also loved how you portrayed Tristan and Aurelia as two perfect halves of one whole, with each naturally being stronger for the other when one is feeling weak, such as when Tristan used his survival skills to make camp and hunt and care for Aurelia’s broken leg, yet Aurelia was strong for Tristan when they were journeying through the desert and the heat would overcome him.

There was one sentence in Chapter 5, “Rescue,” that I was particularly grateful to see as a reader and impressed to see as an editor. Instead of dragging the reader through pages and pages of useless, agonizing suspense as to what would happen once Tristan and Aurelia became separated, you simply mention, “Tristan did not realise it, but he would not see her again for a very long time.”

I thought this was very skilfully done, because it allowed you to launch in a different direction in the story line and bring the fully focused reader with you. So often authors miss this point, and in an effort to strive for suspense they instead the reader to be constantly distracted from the path of that different direction because they’re worried about another character (“What happened to Aurelia?”).

Chapters 9 and 10 tend to be a little heavy on the battle sequences. They are action-packed and realistically portrayed and described, but some readers might lose interest, as it may seem like heavy reading to them.

Character Development
I especially liked the way you managed to capture the subtle interplay between men and women in the interactions between Tristan and Aurelia; even though this may have been written with the intent of describing just those characters’ interactions, as a reader I picked up on the subtle message of how “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” to use an old saying, and how we can seem almost like aliens to one another! Again, you may not have intended this, but it was an effective undertone to their dialogue.