I loooooooooved it! You're a natural writer! I think you have a brilliant plot to work with and the characters are very believable. It's a wonderful story.

I can't wait to read more!

~Ebony~

I'm changing the first chapter for sure. Instead of the jolting awake thing, I think I might do Summer working with the villagers in preparation for the trader's feast. Thanks for the feedback!

And. To everyone else: I won't be posting up chapters until I get well into the story (maybe chapter four or five) or until I can submit chapters without taking the whole novel offline. Thank you guys so much for taking the time to read!

lovelycheese, I read your novel! First let me say that I am very impressed! Great vocabulary and astounding story-line!

Now, there are some things that you need to fix. In several sentences in Chapter 2 you either have too many words (to the point where the sentence doesn't make sense or is a run-on sentence) or not enough words (where the reader might have to mentally fill in needed words for themselves). That would be your main issue as of right now. 

Aside from that, I love Summer and Mira! Wow! I love how they look out for each other! Your story is amazing! 

How did you ever come up with such an amazing story-line?

I will notify you as soon as I can, as I'm on an extremely tight schedule. Probably tomorrow I'll get to reviewing your work.

Thanks so much! Your comment means a lot to me(:

I really, really, enjoyed this. I love fantasy stories, but only if they're really good; this one definitely is! I wasn't sure about the third chapter at first, but I was relieved to see that it all came back around to Summer and Mira in the end and wasn't just a history lesson. Just one thing I pointed out: "Thirty gold pieces was more Summer’s savings tripled." There should be a 'than' between more and Summer. 

Maybe you could check out my novel? It's called The Formation in the realistic fiction section. I would really appreciate some advice. Thanks!

=) I'm glad my critique was helpful.  I was afraid it was too short with my limited time.

No problem with the readability--I'm a Grammar Na.zi. XD

And I'm glad you're someone who realizes the publisher no-nos. =D That'll make everything much easier.

Ahhh~ yeah, that's another one. Publisher no-no's. Changing the first chapter is one of my top re-do's for Celestial. 

Haha, I have a problem of not picking out errors that might affect readability, so thanks for point those out. 

I'm very, very behind. I barely scratched out chapter three after about three months (I know) on the novel, so yes, I'll combine the chapters.

Your critique was superb. Most helpful of all. Thank you so much for the time critiquing! I really appreciate it!(:

Thanks for the helpful critique! 

I have been googling publisher advice, and the prologue thing did come up a couple of times. I'm still debating whether to include the prologue or to cut it. 

Once again thanks!(:

I had to comment separately on the prologue and first chapter, my comment was too long. =P

Chapter 1:

This is more than just a pet peeve—it’s a cliché.  When the MC wakes up at the beginning of the first chapter. I know, you want to say ‘But there’s no other way to start it!’, and I know changing your own stuff is torturous—I’m not even saying you have to change it—but wake-up scenes at the beginning of novels have, sadly, become an over-used cliché.  Especially with a dream sequence.

I like how you slightly twisted the cliché of an MC seeing themselves in a mirror; while you do enter her appearance from seeing her reflection, the fact that she saw it in a pendant, not a mirror, makes it slightly better.

You don’t need to mention her ‘amber eyes’ twice in the same paragraph.

Something I’ve seen—there are a number of places where it looks like the word ‘the’ has been left out, and while it’s not technically incorrect the way you have it, it would probably sound better with the ‘the’ before it.

“And you shouldn’t go discriminating [against] women either.”  You can’t just use ‘discriminating’, you need the ‘against.’

“If eyes could ever look more like knives, it would [be] Mira’s blue ones right now.”  ßSame deal as before.

Mira is an interesting character—I like her.

Your dialogue is a bit of a problem.  On the one hand, the words themselves are excellent.  It doesn’t sound awkward, unnatural, it flows very well.  That’s a good thing.  On  the other hand, though, you use very few dialogue tags, especially later in the chapter.  And while you don’t want to overuse those, you  need to use them enough that the reader knows who’s talking and how they’re saying it.  Near the end, with their exchanges, I became slightly lost, not sure whom was speaking.  Just try to sneak in a few tags to clarify.

I applaud you for the fact that, despite this being high fantasy, in neither your prologue nor your first chapter do you have a huge, frightening block of telling.  This is something most fantasy writers, myself included, struggle with—not just having a huge info dump with no ‘showing’ in the first chapter.  Yet yours had none, but it worked.

Hmm.  I checked how many words this chapter had—1,000-something.  While, unfortunately, I have seen shorter chapters on here, a 1,000 word chapter is too short for most published novels.  That’s about four pages, maybe less.  It’s typical to make your chapters at least 2,000, and even that is on the short side.  So if all your chapters are 1,000 words, I’d suggest combining every two, just making a scene break instead of a chapter break.

Also, relating to what I mentioned above—you may already know this, but published novels rarely stray under 50,000 words, and that’s very short. 50,000 words is about 200 pages, on a smaller-sized novel.  Fantasy novels typically range from 70,000 words to….oh, 200,000.

^^Just wanted to mention.

Overall: I did my best to critique.  Despite what it may sound like, I really, really enjoyed reading this.  Why?  It’s some of the best, most polished writing I’ve read on this site.  You have no idea how relieved I was to finally see something with proper grammar, proper dialogue punctuation, proper comma placement, etc.  Aside from the things I’ve mentioned, you’re off to a very solid start.  I’d like to check back in on this piece and read more when I’ve the time. =)